The Past
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: You go out with someone and everything’s great until it turns south and you part ways. 5 or 10 years later even you see this person again and you see a totally different person and you start to wonder “what if I had sticked around?” If you read Saturday’s entry then you know I’ve been riding a nostalgia train of sorts and what it brings is a lot of “looking back” and “reminiscing” and a bunch of other things that as a young adult I shouldn’t be doing for fear of a mental breakdown. I read this, and it made me think about my own fuck ups even more. Then on Sunday I saw a great friend of mine I hadn’t seen in years and it just punted the weekend high up in the air to “surreal” territory. I came to two conclusions after all of this happened:
1) You can never completely escape your past in Panama. Short of buying a plane ticket and leaving the country, you will always run into that girl/boy that broke your heart, that person that owes you money or you owe them, that person you vowed never to talk to again, et al. Let’s face it: Panama City is not New York City. It’s not even Manhattan! there have been times where I run into the same person more than 3 times in different points of the city within the week. It’s not uncommon, and not only that but since the city is so small people not only happen to bump into each other more frequently but they also get to know each other quicker. Case in point: I saw people this weekend, each of them people I had met in different times and in different instances and they all happened to know each other. All of them. It gets even more ridiculous when I broaden my scope of friends and I find that I really do have a network of people that know each other, while at the same time they all know me. That’s why gossip travels so fast and this whole “juega vivo” culture is so embedded in our spines: there’s so little opportunities for everything and so many people vying for the same things that “looking out for number 1″ looks like a very attractive approach for you to get a shot at anything. Panama City would benefit very much from an expansion. a large expansion. A society where people could branch out and find what they want out of life without having to fight with everyone else for it because there’s so little that’s offered to begin with. Hell, I’d rather vote for a city expansion rather than a Panama Canal expansion. The broadening of society and culture instead of a Canal that, the more and more I find about the project that’s being proposed, the more it reeks of bullshit.
2) We as individuals will always have demons we will wrestle with on a daily basis. I look at my life and I see everything I ever wanted out of it; to sum it up real nice and neat, in the back of my head I wanted to be able to give my kids fantastic stories about their dad’s awesome adventures. I want them to be proud of me and I want to be able to say that I never wasted my youth… and I’ve come to the conclusion that your personal demons are a huge part of that. Nobody wants to feel like they’re wasting their time. They also don’t want to feel vulnerable or scared… they want to be where it’s safe. I’ve been in a ride for the past few years where I’ve ignored every sound advice I’ve ever been given and jumped head-first into impossible situations that I know will most likely not end up well yet I still do, thinking that “maybe this time it’ll come out just right.” Of course, it never does but that doesn’t squoosh my hopes down. Every person is a story, and my mind gravitates to that… you, as an individual beating heart want to be able to touch people’s lives and with good reason. Everyone wants to be loved, appreciated and accounted for. It’s as basic as food or sleep; be it good or bad, you can rest assured that someone out there is thinking about you. You exist in somebody’s memory. You’re somebody’s demon.
We’re all sinners. I know I’ve involuntarily broken hearts and pissed people off… and sometimes I’ve done it to deliberately burn bridges. No one’s entirely clean and that’s why a lot of people don’t like talking about their pasts… in many respects, one of the reasons why they never tell is because they feel partly responsible for their histories to go down the way they have. You learn quickly that there’s nothing you can do to erase it and many people choose to lock that away in a dungeon and throw away the key and I see why they would do that because nobody likes to re-live painful memories or bad decisions they’ve made or never did. God knows I don’t. But, you know what? When you live in Panama, no matter how much you try to ignore it, the city or town where you live in is so small that you’ll end up having to see places, people and others that will simply remind you of everything you want to avoid. It’s impossible to ignore your past when you’re in Panama, on all levels. There are people who still hold grudges with each other, going as far up in scale as the 2 most powerful political parties in the country (PRD – Partido Panameñista), and there are rivalries exposed in the public eye that in many ways emulate the latest episode of the wrestling soap opera antics in “WWE Raw.” I see people I’d love to forget all the time… “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” was, during the time it was relased, something I wish could really happen. Clean up my slate and start over. But then again, I thought, what would be the fun in that? I am who I am because of the decisions I’ve made and the things I’ve seen and felt and heard; I’ve come to respect and appreciate my demons because, whether I enjoy their company or not they’re a pivotal part of who I’ve become. This realization has become so much a part of who I am that sometimes I take sadistic pleasure in jumping into situations I know will make me uncomfortable, and as a result I end up enjoying it all even more. That’s how I can jump out of windows, moving vehicles, deal with Riflemen, my torment, crazy ex girlfriends and other assorted people and situations that will shock and awe my children when I tell them about all the crazy stuff I did before I got their mom pregnant.
People will love you. People will hate you. People will never care about you and that is the way of things. I sincerely doubt that this is the last weekend in my life where I’ll see so many instances of my past in such a short period of time and personally I can’t wait for it to happen again. I have learned quite a few things about myself though, and all I can say about that is that it’s good to know that there’s always room for improvement. That, and there are some demons you can never quite get enough of. Which, by the way, makes me want to have the life of my Sims. With all of their ups and downs, they seemed to have had a great run. I suggest you play it, or just exorcise your demons in the way of art… the results can be astonishing.
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