My Bipolar Journal - Episode 209

My Bipolar Journal – Episode 209

May 28, 2008

I think some people think that getting a dog makes them grown up. Like if they can purchase a living thing and manage to not kill it that somehow they have succeeded in life. The problem with that is that everyone that I know can’t take care of themselves, let alone a living thing. Everyone I know wants to travel, be on the road, and not be at home at night. Some people think that they’ve found someone who will take care of it for them while their gone and then that person winds up resenting them for it. Who suffers though? The dog. It gets attached and then gets left with the person who didn’t really want the dog to begin with. Or it gets left with the person who did, but can’t properly take care of it. Dogs are harder to take care of than kids most of the time, but somehow people think it prepares them for that. Dogs never grow up though. They never learn to talk or feed themselves or get jobs and they’ll always have to be let out every so often so they can never be left alone. Leaving a dog outside all the time is just cruel. Flies eat their ears and there are allergies and disease and cold and rain and just the pure loneliness of being left outside and not joining the rest of the family. Yet somehow people think it’s ok to just leave them alone outside despite the conditions because people are selfish. Once the dog becomes a responsibility it gets left alone and neglected. Maybe not for people who have decided to be content with conformity and the rules that make them miserable from day to day, but for the people that I know and associate with. People feel it’s a way to connect with their girlfriend/boyfriend and create a “family” that they never get to be a part of. It’s really just all very sad to me.

Why do people keep living by these superficial rules? Why do people who have decided to be happy and make other people happy with their music keep trying to fall back into the same conditioning they have been fighting against every day? The conditioning they’ve fought by writing words about it and melodies that make people want to move and shake and bounce and be free with? Why do we have to drag other living beings into our selfishness and idealism of what other people have told us is happiness? Why can’t we all just be content to actually be happy rather than try to convince ourselves with things like puppies or girlfriends or boyfriends or marriage or friends that we can’t keep even remotely content considering the lifestyle we’ve chosen? Why can’t we just be the person that we feel we are and align ourselves with people who simply understand us for just us, even if they can’t let us out to pee every four hours or call us on the phone every day? It’s exhausting. So exhausting even that those of us who have accepted ourselves as we are find everyone else exhausting. Sometimes that makes me want to step back and evaluate myself, but I’ve already been there and it just wasn’t worth it. The only thing that exhausts me now is watching people I love be content with less than what they are and people I care about be less than happy and convince themselves that it’s normal. I’m exhausted even writing about it, but talking to people about it is even more exhausting since everyone’s trying to convince themselves that what they’re doing is normal and that buying puppies is excusable.