Chapter 1
Comfort is the death of all experience. I love to preach that--and loud. No truth, for me, has withstood so much life. Again for the sake of it, comfort is the death of all experience! I tell my brothers and sisters all the time: that’s what I call my particular band of people. Some call them my followers, which I wholeheartedly renounce (renounce is such a dramatic term, that’s what I love about it, the flamboyance and lift of its cadence).
Anyways, back to my band of confidants and our living truth: Death to comfort, the bane of all experience. We arrived at this credo through years of hell. A secret torment of which you’d never guess the source. I’m talking sparkling gray concrete, a shimmering blanket of sun, that “Hi! How are the kids?. I’m talking about where people go for shelter, not a life, where people’s success somehow entitles them to quiet stagnation of the soul. It’s that putrid, gilded. spick and span suburban life. The kind dressed up with stick family stickers on Tahoe’s, new chain restaurants sprouting on every corner, and the face produced by it all: the complacent face. How I despise it (Despise is another word I like to use for the theater of it). What is it about the smothering mother that is the suburbs that produces such a muted expression. Like satisfied old house pets--you might as well renounce colored clothes and only dress in gray.
I’m keeping this journal to document our deliverance from this cursed life, my band and me, as we leave homey malaise for a more exciting self-induced desperation. We’ve found a shabby old house on the outskirts of the drug district, where no landlords or authority can infringe upon our confined freedom. We will live as man was designed to live, at the precipice of danger and thus at the forefront of adventure, no longer attacked by the slow death of suburban life. Our hardship will breed freedom.
