Blue is No Lifer

Lifers take it easy.

Lifers are the people who prefer the ‘word’ safety to the ‘fact’ of banality. They wash their vegetables and their fruit. Run on treadmills until they have the sustainable thin film of fat around their edges. Are about maintenance. Efficient.

Lifers take it easy and are, therefore, not up for debate.

Blue is born. Shoved out of a small whole blasted with cold air, man handled smacked, stabbed, and bundled.
Blue it subjected to reality. Colours, feelings, shapes, dimensionality, voices, music, noise, man made objects, nature.
Then blue learns to name all of these things – all while suffering growing pains and the invention of teeth. Blue’s care taker – whom he trusts completely then spurns him, makes him chew his own food, and begins leaving him to his own faculties.
As Blue grows, he is told what to do, how to act, how to talk. He’s introduced to more people his age where he enters an unparalleled world of exploration and imagination.
Blue has an imaginary friend until some dim witted 12 year old tells him he’s a sissy.
Blue suffers any number of scabbed knees and bandages, learns coordination – gets slugged with a few balls in activities classes where he learns to catch. Blue’s sexual hormones come into play. He goes through all stages of irrational anger, shyness, pride, masturbation. Blue might kiss a girl who doesn’t like it, so he’ll be rejected, he learns about deodorant after someone calls him names. Blue gets tones of zits learns to deal with reality that his body is as it is and no wellwishing or magic charms will make a girl like him, nor will his penis grow.
So Blue heads through a secondary school where he has to choose a career path while confronting any number of people who are so stupid and selfish that it’s blasphemous, meanwhile questioning what he believes, being satisfied with the answer that “man knows” nothing, becomes a genius, focuses on his grades, loses his viriginty while he’s drunk at party – becomes “the man” – and is suddenly popular three days before graduation. This all while at home having yelled at his mother for the first time, being forced to get a job, no longer getting birthday cards from cousins and aunts and uncles, and watching his parents go through some form of mid life crisis. Blue takes up smoking, is satisfied he knows how it courses through his veins and trades it for casual marijuana.
Next step Blue reaches university where he lives up the lack of supervision makes a few creepy friends whom he spurns two weeks later after the liquor wears off and settles down to be a serious student. Now considering himself a man, blue goes through 4 years of some university he picked out of a hat, taking Philosophy and meeting any description of a human being. His first serious relationship was spent with his dreams of marriage floating in the air with romantic sweet nothing being discussed over brunches of waffles and strawberries that Blue made himself. Not the strawberries. She leaves him for Japan where she teaches English and Blue continues to discover how small ideas are meant to become big thoughts as papers balloon to 35 and 40 pages. Degree in hand(despite the frustrating lack of books at the badly organized library) Blue exits the horrid tight world of “young adulthood” and is thrown jobless, with few qualifications or handy job skills to find a job, a friend, a town, a house, an experience, a favorite coffee shop, and maybe at some point a beautiful woman (or man).
Is Blue a lifer? Does he choose the well beaten desert path?
No. Determined not to be bored Blue picks up a trumpet and plays day and night, pays a bum for some lessons, and decides that love doesn’t matter that he’ll just have a good life and write an autobiography. As all people uncertain of their choices Blue floats from town to town afraid he’ll become too settled if he stays longer than a year. In a coffee shop in Prague – THE coffee shop for his neighbourhood - Blue meets an exchange student who is intelligent and isn’t afraid of spiders in Africa. So they pick up and move, documenting Africa like well traveled anthropologists. Blue grows a beard and she thinks it’s handsome. They volunteer on any number of African committees, help build towns until they’re both exhausted and ready for air conditioning. They both agree that their migratory season is up, venture up slowly and resignedly to France where both write and explore the country side as well as the cuisine. They open a bed and breakfast – both bickering about money, but in the end no one cares. Blue writes books about philosophy while the exchange student from Prague opens a craft store and volunteers in the community.
Adulthood though is fraught with random illness – each person in life being allotted at least one medical mystery, the questions, the adventure, the what ifs, the decision of offspring, the decision of beliefs, and standpoints, the fights, the quips, the snoring – all of it cumulative to the point where at 80 they sit down -after having begun this process for two other lives now gallivanting somewhere in the world – on a bench to contemplate the stillness of this one brief moment.

These are not the lifers. These are the explorers.