Losers in Krakow!

What is a loser? What is an artist? Better still Why is there a website dedicated to their mutual embarrassment? I think I better question to address is Why has travel become one of the favorite ways for people to articulate time? And quite possibly the most successful means of escape?

Most of us, even those of us who are not artists self-professed or otherwise, are exclusively from the west. Our consumer culture has taught us that Travel is something to be acquired. If we stay at home forever, in the same city, same job, and environment we get bored. We get bored of our world and with ourselves. Our everyday lives wear thin, it runs dry, loses its freshness, its innocence, its joi d’vivre. Time drifts away imperceptibly… we are near unconscious in our dull lives as much as we are overwhelmed by the anesthetic of familiarity. We are losers.

The simple act of boarding a 747 and violently ripping ourselves across half the planet is enough. We step out of our routines and are reborn. We feel like we have entered a new life by changing not ourselves but our environment. Thanks to the flow of small, pleasant shocks of new experiences, unfamiliar spaces, we begin to feel that we can still respond to the world. We are intensely alive experiencing the flow of time at utmost intensity. In foreign lands there are still surprises! They still contain secrets; whereas in our own land there are no mysteries left. Nothing to tempt, attract or intrigue. Nothing to flirt with us. Whereas here we have the promise of new experience and new a life. If there are undiscovered parts of the world then there is still hope. Anything & everything can happen; we may still find ourselves somewhere. Our sheltered lives are not meaningless after-all?

What is traveling if not the most successful means of escape in our consumer culture? Travelers are free as birds. We have no duties, only rights. We enjoy the right of hospitality. Ever notice how tourists often behave as children? We step out of our usual dull lives; we’re louder, laugh more, wear more colorful clothing, dance, and behave irresponsibly in public. We have an enhanced sense of entitlement, we expect the natives to act kindly toward us, we require they acknowledge us, especially if they’re less “developed” than the western home we went to so much effort to escape. We are now our state’s representatives. We expect them to forgive our minor breaches of law or customs.

Traveling is a glorious campaign, we march into countries as conquerers. We walk in the streets that these people built for themselves, we enter public buildings, shamelessly look into their windows, we profane their holy shrines so that we may take possession of it.

We are losers; not because some of us teach english and have well manicured facial hair. Or because some of us introduce ourselves as artists or musicians. And not because some of us crossed the atlantic to do it. This is simply an effect. The true cause is our mask, our means of escape, our mount Vesuvius. We are losers because we found it not only appealing but necessary to escape our dull meaningless existence so completely. A deception so devious and dark we kept this truth even from ourselves. With the finesse of a wanton degenerate who continually bums cigarettes we inflict ourselves onto unwitting masses. If we were members of a lower more honest caste we would resort to drug abuse or middle-class therapy. Our own level of education and/or sophistication blinds us. It presents us a pleasant fiction of our new lives and conjures up the artist in all of us.

If you can read this and feel contempt for yourself and what you’ve thus far represented, there is hope. You might even be worth saving. But jesus won’t help you, he feels as much contempt for you as you yourself. You have been exposed. You are a fraud and a charlatan. You can crawl away into the dark no longer. There’s no melody to set or lyrics you can write; no trim of the facial hair to mask what you are. Accept it. Accept your place in a world where there is no escape from small minds and small mindedness. Have the courage to escape the pretense and vanity you yourself invent. You have no birthright. You escaped your mothers womb while it was still warm and now you’re trying to crawl back. Well she doesn’t want you and neither does anyone else.

“Hi My Name is ____ and I am a loser.”

Anything less and you are the doomed.

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