getting by is just not enough anymore

A week ago, Nicole and I went to open mic poetry at a hip jazz bar with blue lighting and reformed hippies. A bunch of regulars read their work, lots of explicit sex which is especially uncomfortable to hear coming from a grandma (of course it could be fiction, but the smirk on her face made me feel there was some truth behind it... icky).

Since I've been thinking more and more about applying for programs to earn a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry, I started to question myself... why would I want to voluntarily surround myself amongst people like this? I'm stereotyping, but there is some truth to a brooding, suffering poet. Who else is self centered enough to think his feelings are unique and deserve to be read and beloved by the world? I get along with most people, I think, but whiny bitches are where I draw the line.*

Getting an MFA isn't like going to grad school. You can write poems without the letters MFA suffixing your name. You aren't going to be arrested for writing a book without a degree like you would if conducted surgery without the letters MD. Do i just want to prove to people that I haven't plateaued? That i'm still on course for more than an entry level job that pays a buck and a half more than the absolute bottom the state will allow?

When did we start having to do more than just live? When did surviving become insufficient while all other creatures with whom we share this earth consider survival the greatest form of accomplishment? Without any background in anthropology or history, I'm pretty sure the turning point was precisely when surviving became easy, expected. Once the challenge of gathering food was simplified to a trip to Fred Meyers and the possibility of getting killed by a gila monster or musky, predatory mammal was reduced to nil save for the most unfortunate or the dumbest of the species, our most natural human challenges evaporated. People needed to invent new things to make life more difficult and, ever since we've been seeking achievements, praise, and approval as desperately as our ancestors sought consistent sources of glucose and clean water.

It impresses neither employers nor girls to brag that you've eaten food every day without fail for the last twenty seven years. Nor are guests at cocktail parties particularly wowed when you confide, "I have never suffered from mumps or rubella." My question: is there any way to reverse this inflation that human contentment seems to be suffering? Can I lower the bar and be satisfied with doing less? Maybe no one else wants to regress like me. But, can I personally oppose this trend that demands I do more and be more than I am now? I eat every day of the week. I sleep out of the rain. Homo habilis would be envious of my bike repair abilities. What more do I really need? I'm almost certain that if I were struggling to obtain those basic needs, all the feelings of longing and insufficiency that poison my thoughts would not exist. And if that's true, then it's all a head game: these modern human needs of accomplishment and accolades are invented and not a biological necessity. So that proves they can be controlled, right? And besides having food and shelter, I received the best birthday present possible: Isaiah Thomas has been evicted from both the front office and the coach's bench at Madison Square Garden. That would be enough to make any homo habilis throw his excessively long arms up to heaven in gratitude.

*This is the trait I find most salient in my roommate Marty, which is the reason I dislike her so much. Her own bitching isn't so offensive to me as the fact that she reminds me how I can be a little bitch myself and that's one of the things I hate the most about myself. As the band Down says, "I'm trying to kill what's wrong with me." I wish Marty's last name started with an R. That way she could be MartyR which is how she presents herself, maybe a bit more vocal about her suffering though than say St Stephen, Martin Luther King, or Gandhi. Unfortunately, her last name starts with an S.