lobotomy (" i'm a driver, i'm a winner, things are going to change I can feel it")

I awake to neutral. I fall asleep to neutral. benevolence, lackadaisical, open. Here, there, present: dashing to past and future, but often here again. medium, gray. I am the same person here that i was there. I learn some things throughout the day, but go to bed essentially the same, mostly unchanged. I am very skeptical of this condition. I am not happy or sad. I do not think strongly about this or that. I have been at work on an art project that was to be pointed and pose an argument, then I flipped sides through plotting and now it poses a conversation, a pairing for the viewer, malaise. Passion, to feel strongly about a thing and not understand the other side, to what is it like? I can appear to have passion, but it is facade, a moral work order to gut through, leftover Puritanical drive ingrained in my behavioral code. To know exactly what I want and do it with purpose, with intention. I recognize those qualities, yet carry not the flame or single mindedness to get there. I see things in dichotomies while living in the center. it's muffled in the middle. i look middle, feel middle, act middle, think middle, am middle. so stuffy here. sometimes the animal awakens inside and lashes, to get out, but from where, to where, i don't know. so it rages and I seek a pacifier, a muffler. i wait until it falls asleep again. It is a place of unease some days and comfort others. it is not the middle culled about by mind numbing agents like Prozac or nitrous. not the euphoric nothing middle. no this is stationary while moving neutral, outside observer inside self. i look to the existentialists for comfort, advice, conciliation, but short of being buried next to Sarte and de Beauvoir, I roam. I am a humanist caught in an existential dilemma or maybe it's the other way around.

"Show me the way to go home, I'm sick and I want to go to be. Had a drink about an hour ago and it went straight to my head." (a song my dementia ridden oldies used to sing)

But I don't want that. Yes, yes I do. Maybe it's not so bad. Maybe it's the lack of bad in my life that gives me place to be in the middle and I should be thankful for this placement. this mediocrity. humdrum, hoe hum. to feel alive, to run, to laugh to be carefree without thought, frolicking in forest, strapping lover, wine spilling from cup, love in the pines, amongst drums of woodpeckers and hums of elves. i'm a romantic and cynic, I can't imagine it without the grin of skepticism, yet the inner chord plays. Play the game, pretend, and one day it will be. the pragmatic side, rationalism ensues. Smile and one day it will be without falsity, without showmanship. Honest i do really laugh from my gut, but with age comes a bit of callous, a bit of the cynic's laugh, not the honest innocent belt from my youth, a more reserved, cautious one. Forget romance, focus on positive thinking (self help 101). Maybe its in the work one does, be steadfast, dedicated, become respected, a role model. The pressure to perform. so i sit in the neutral zone, taking some risks weighing others. hoping for a natural break in the forest or the parking lot. reading things like "Neutral" in hopes they make me feel more or less than such.

sometimes we take ourselves much too seriously for this performance and her back cracks at the core as she stretches up to take her applause.