Running in the background, constantly and to everyone’s detriment.  I’ll try to describe it in summary.

Dreams are seldom realized, that’s the set-up, the hard truth, why dreams are mostly dreams.  A variety of myths about freedom, living the dream, exist, but they are mostly bullshit.  Our idea of freedom is like holding a cloud.  Becoming free, in any meaningful sense, is hard, scary work.   Too hard and scary for most of us.  We collect, instead of the thing we actually want, a series of consolation prizes.  Then we try to believe that these prizes are as good as what we once held out for.

There is nothing so terrible in this, except how it predisposes us to cast a critical eye on others while we try to console ourselves.   Nobody is singing our praises, why should we sing anybody else’s?  And the cycle, vicious as any, rides on downhill with the wind at its back.  It takes only gravity to keep it going.

Someone weaker than you, recognized for strength?  Maddening.  A mediocre singer praised for singing when what you love best is to croon soulfully?  Infuriating.  In the real world it’s who you know and who you blow and blah blah blah.  So you send me your best attempt at a poem, in a moment of hope, I’ll let it drop into the silence it came from.  

You’d do the same for me, I’m sure, most people do.  And, of course, we’re all very busy trying to be born before the lights go out forever, or trying to forget death, or trying to write our own symphony, or pop masterpiece, or the perfect haiku, or chasing the distraction to end distraction.

Maddened in the city of abandoned dreams we rush about chasing consolation prizes.  The dream we dreamed fading mostly.  They only torment us when we dream of them again and ponder the gulf that now separates us from them.   Watching somebody else rush towards some noble truth or another only reminds us how far we are from ours.  It sticks in our throats.

Best of all not to even mention it, nobody gives much of what we really need to us, anyway.  In fact, forget, if you can, that I even mentioned it.