For various irrational reasons, I’m feeling quite forlorn and abandoned. Such is life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the trajectory of my life lately. I haven’t really come with any good answers, and I feel like I’m working against the ever-ticking clock for some reason. It seems like the only time I can really make definitive decisions is when I’m put on the spot. Otherwise I just end up ruminating endlessly over increasingly worn-down ideas without ever coming to a conclusion.

And, neither here nor there, it occurs to me that I’ve been lonely for a long time. Maybe numbness is not the worst thing to be feeling these days.

Don’t wish. Don’t start.
Wishing only wounds the heart.

Wow. What’s kind of creeping me out is how topical the political interpretations of the original The Wizard of Oz are.

The Tin Man represents American industry paralyzed by rising oil prices. (In the original context of the 1890s, L. Frank Baum was a vocal critic of Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller.) The flying monkeys may represent immigrants, people-of-color. (In the original context of the 1890s, they may allude to Chinese immigrants on the West Coast, or the retreating Native American peoples of the West.) Gregory Maguire makes this even more explicit by casting the Animals as a persecuted minority whose civil rights are being taken away.

It is 17 days until November 4th, which—one way or the other—is a day that promises to be epically historic. I predict that we will see record-high voter turn-out, that’s for certain. And I won’t say anything more than that. I can only hope for certain outcomes, but we all know where hoping has gotten me this year.

While his critics levy charges of ephemerality, vagueness, and abstraction, Barack Obama has certainly tapped a vein with his message of change and hope. As dark as the near future seems these days, with the likelihood that this recession will be the deepest and longest in recent memory, and with apocalyptic pronouncements of “being worse than the Great Depression,” it seems inevitable that the people must abandon the sinking ship that is the status quo. Al Gore may have hurt himself by distancing himself too much from Bill Clinton in 2000, but there is no doubt that John McCain has harmed his campaign by failing to distance himself enough from George W Bush. His desperate retort against Obama—”I am not George Bush!”—was too little, too late, particularly when the most concrete aspects of his policies that I managed to glean were that he was simply going to “cut taxes” and “cut government spending,” the continual empty mantra of the Republican Party. I say empty because this current administration has done little of either over the past eight years, (at least, certainly, little for the middle class or for the poor.)

But change is inevitable. Obviously, we hope that it will be change for the better, but I’ve also learned to expect the worst. The drumbeats are already pounding, as people go looking for a scapegoat to blame for the dire straits we’re in. Certainly, the people actually responsible for our predicament have not stepped up to the plate and accepted responsibility—the ruling class, the CEOs, the speculators, the charlatans, the white-collared thieves. Certain populist malefactors have been decrying ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act. Those are the code words. The dog whistles. And the angry mob is raising their torches and pitchforks. It is all too apparent that they are planning to blame this all on minorities, on people-of-color, on the poor, on the powerless.

But Obama is not just an empty suit. He clearly possesses a mind like a steel trap. He has utilized the successful techniques of grass-root organizers and activists to run a campaign unlike anything ever seen before. Maybe Howard Dean and Joe Trippi had run a prototype version of such a campaign. But the necessary tools weren’t yet in place. And the traditional media shot them out of the sky.

But Obama’s ground teams have been creeping across the country and infiltrating the very soil exactly like roots. Yes, we can. This is not a new motto. For the last century, workers seeking fairness have chanted this very thing, in English, in Spanish.

In the end, he will not save us. We can only save ourselves. What he is doing is reminding us of this very fact. America is The People, and The People are powerful. We seem to have forgotten that, stupefied by the mind-numbing modern equivalents of bread and circuses that distract us from the calumny of the ruling classes who have led us off a cliff.

Which leads me to the thing that was on my mind when I started this post. This false dichotomy between reform and revolution. I’m still hoping that maybe we can use the System itself to fix itself, without violence, without bloodshed. Looking back at American history makes me apprehensive, though. I certainly think of the Civil War. I also think about the Civil Rights Movement. I think of the Free Speech Movement and the protests against our ill-fated imperialist adventure in Vietnam. And then I think of the smoke and the flames as a city burned around me when I was just a teen-ager, a city fractured by race and socioeconomic status. Rodney King, Reginald Denny. Florence and Normandie. Pico and Alvarado. The black and brown faces of the people looting the Fedco on La Cienega. The Koreans on the rooftops, shooting at people in the streets. The National Guard went to protect Beverly Hills, but there was no one there in K-Town, in South Central. Even cops were fleeing. Those last particular details remain sharply embedded in my brain.

I’m trying to wrap my mind around what may be the worst-case scenarios might be like.

And even if Barack Obama is peacefully inaugurated on January 20th, 2009, that’s only going to the beginning of this national struggle. The next few years are going to be dark. Can we keep the flame of our nation lit without torching ourselves?

Even a dilettante interested in American History knows that laissez-faire capitalism is a myth. There has never been a time in American history where there were no protections to trade. Whenever ever financial institutions that were too big to fail failed, the government always stepped in to bail them out. The Federal Reserve, the Bretton Woods pact that Nixon finally killed, the $700 billion dollar bailout just recently approved by Congress. There has always been manipulation of the so-called free markets. Ostensibly, it has always been done for the good of the American People. While deluded free-marketers may believe that the Invisible Hand should reign unchallenged, sane people still understand that the reason government exists is to protect the liberty of the people first and foremost, market forces be damned.

Social Security and Medicare, the bugaboos of conservatives, have not transformed our government into a communist totalitarian regime. If the FDIC didn’t exist, I guarantee people would’ve been jumping out of windows a couple of weeks ago, banking branches would’ve been torn apart by panicked account holders, and chaos would be reigning in the streets. I think we as a nation are slowly learning that “liberal” and “socialist” may not be as bad as we thought.

Certainly the 1990’s have taught us that communist totalitarian regimes don’t really work, well, except perhaps in China, Vietnam, and Cuba, I guess. But I think what we’re learning in this century is that a poorly regulated capitalist democracy isn’t very democratic. It becomes a kleptocracy, which is really no freer than totalitarianism. Instinctively, I think we as a nation know this. Even John McCain has changed his tack and is touting “responsible regulation.”

So maybe not all the ideas of the Marxists are bankrupt. Not all the ideas of Adam Smith are sacrosanct. It is left for us to sensibly winnow the wheat from the chaff. It will not be surprising if what we need is a hybrid of ideas, a strategy that is crafted from a myriad of ideas from the past, tweaked for the present time. How post-modern is that?

But the specter of violent revolution lingers. The words of JFK are kind of spooky. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” There will be those who cling hard to the past, who resist change even to the detriment of their own interests. I’m hoping that they really are a scattered few. Dead-enders. Relics of eras long gone.

All of this is prelude to my fractured thoughts as I watched the musical “Wicked” at the Pantages yesterday. It is, indeed, a fable for our modern times. As an unnamed aide to George W Bush so triumphantly put it in 2004, “…what we call the reality-based community… believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This theme is the heart of this Stephen Schwarz musical based on Gregory Maguire’s revisionist fairy tale set in the world of Oz (and even the original story is suspected of harboring political allegory.) Maguire re-imagines the cardboard cut-out villain—the Wicked Witch of the West—as more of a Che Guevara-type revolutionary, fraught with the very same moral ambiguity that clouds Guevara’s image. Someone filled with passion and anger, who wasn’t hesitant about being ruthless and using violence to achieve their goals. The victorious writers of history have decided for the sake of propaganda and simplicity to ignore their complexities and to tag them with the monochrome label “Evil,” but victors often forget that the vanquished have real, still unaddressed grievances against people who intentionally sought to deliberately harm them and the people around them, even if in an impersonal manner.

While the musical necessarily adds some saccharine to the subject matter, toning down on the moral ambiguity, and even giving it a happy ending, from what I understand, the book is a lot less apologist. Did this person commit acts of irredeemable evil? Does this necessarily invalidate the acts of good? Certainly mass murder and assassination would never fit in the “Good” category, but we seem to be selective about which perpetrators we’re willing to pardon and who we’re willing to condemn. Terrorist or freedom fighter, right?

I harbor no illusion that future revolutionaries will not be subjected to the same vagaries of history writing. If you’re on the winning team, you get to be a hero. If you’re not, you’re nothing more than a fanatical terrorist deluded by a dead-end philosophy/lifestyle/religion, filled with nothing but evil, burning in hell. Such is life.

But what I wonder is, is it possible to maintain your morality and ethics when you’re interested in radical change? Probably only if you’re willing to be a martyr. I think of Martin Luther King, Jr. I think of Mohandas Gandhi. They certainly never achieved the goals that their more radicalized, more bloody-minded compatriots hoped for, but I wonder, is that really a bad thing?

I am beginning to truly believe that circumstance cannot excuse acts of evil. But circumstance can sometimes inspire surprising acts of goodness. Can you really do much more than to walk this world hopeful, even if you must still be wary?

I don’t know if it’s just the time of year. Maybe it’s the waning sunlight, heralding my impending succumbing to seasonal affective disorder. Maybe September has never been a good month for me, and October is always about trying to figure out where I went wrong.

You would think that, after a few decades, I would have some sort of idea.

Today, I find myself questioning my purpose in life. Oh, don’t get me wrong. This is probably something I do every day. But it’s usually a brief thought, a transient crack in my already fragile, crumbling ego. For all this time, there has been one thing that has propelled me through time, that has allowed me to endure the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as it were. It was, admittedly, never a very good reason. But it was a reason.

Despite all my high-minded rhetoric, my desire to do the right thing, and my wish to live a fulfilling life, the only concrete goal I’ve ever crafted for myself was that I wanted to be a doctor.

As of June 30, 2008, that journey had officially come to an end. I am now a full-fledged board-eligible internal medicine physician and pediatrician, and, as much as I’ve entertained the thought, I don’t really have the wherewithal to go on with any further training. From here on out, anything I do is entirely of my own volition, and not due to the requirements of some educational accreditation organization. (OK, that’s probably overstating things, but I’m drawing to illustrate a point.)

So it isn’t very surprising that I am feeling incredibly, profoundly lost right now.

I don’t know if it’s a cultural trait, or simply the unspoken mythology of my mother’s side of the family. Underlying everything, perhaps, is this sense of duty. Of responsibility. Oh, the responsibility of power is one thing. When I’m working under the aegis of my profession, it is almost terrifyingly easy to wield this responsibility. This is the Thing™ I have set out to Do, after all.

But then there is personal responsibility. The thing that I’ve learned is that I have a hard time with this form of responsibility. I struggle with it daily. I barely survive that struggle at times. If not for a lot of help from my friends, and my family, I would certainly have died or have killed myself by now. It’s amazing, considering that I can literally be responsible for life and death at any given moment, but I guess that’s the trick of things. It’s easier to be responsible for other people that it is to be responsible for yourself.

The day-to-day things I need to do to keep myself alive and a functioning member of society are, at best, annoying trifles, at worst, nearly unmovable burdens. At times, it seems a lot easier to keep someone alive, to make someone well, than it is to keep myself going. I can’t explain it. There is clearly something wrong with me.

But as long as I had a Purpose™, I could endure it. I have been steadfast, though perhaps somewhat dim-wittedly, unquestioningly so. I have ascribed certain failures in my life as sacrifices to the Purpose™, have foregone any hope of happiness in certain regards and used the Purpose™ as an excuse.

And now that the Purpose™ is for all intents fulfilled, the cowardice of my inaction is laid bare.

There are things that I have failed at, things I have refused to pursue, for the simple reason that I was afraid, and, until now, I’ve always had a plan to fall back on.

Now all my plans seem to lead nowhere, actually. Part of it is that I just want to be still for a while. Perhaps a long while. I just want to stop struggling, stop striving, and just let the current carry me, even if the current throws me off a 100 ft precipice, dashing me against the cruel sharp rocks below. I’ve literally travelled thousands of miles and spent dozens of years to achieve my Purpose™, and right now, I just want to lie here and not do anything. Perhaps I just reached too far, and now that I’ve been cursed with exactly the thing that I wanted, I’m realizing everything else that I’ve given up in order to achieve it, and I’m not entirely sure it was all worth it. Oh, “what if?” In all reality, there was no “what-if.” This is, was, will always be the path that I have taken, and as much as I long for alternate pathways and timelines, there was probably nothing I could’ve done.

The one thing that I am certain of, the one thing that leaves a hollow pit in the bottom of my stomach, that keeps me lying awake at night listening to the silent darkness, is that whatever it is that you want in life that is worth having always, always, always requires a lot of hard work and sacrifice. Oh, sure, there are a lot of other things I would like out of life, but I no longer think I have what it takes to get them. I no longer have that sheer, singlemindedness that got me to where I am today.

I’m just really tired. My soul is damaged and broken in a lot of important ways. And I’m exceedingly lonely.

There is a part of me that wants to know what else there is in life. A childish, whiny, emo part of me, to be sure. A part that just wants things to be*, but isn’t really brave enough to go out there and make those things *become.

There is a part of me that is resigned to the idea that that’s all there is, there ain’t no mo’, and the rest of my life is going to be relatively unchanging, and I’m going to die this way, without passing any more milestones, without experiencing any other sort of personal joy. Oh, I’ll play witness to lots of other people’s joys and sorrows, but that’s it. I’m only going to be a passenger. A spectator.

My question is a typical one. A hackneyed, trite cliché. Is there any further purpose in my life? Was I wrought to do aught else on this mortal plane? Or is this it? The One Thing™? The task of a hundred thousand million little things and small trifles, from which no great glory can be won. Of which no songs or stories are ever written. I guess it’s really a lot better than nothing.

The only thing that really kills me is the suffocating loneliness.

But I suppose you can’t have everything.

It’s a terrible thing, not being able to sleep. Tonight is the second night I’ve woken up around 2 am in a semi-panic, not knowing where I was or how soon I had to get to work. And I don’t know what’s worse, the initial disorientation, or the coming to terms with hard reality.

Last night, I lay awake for a good hour and a half, staring up at the ceiling, twisting and turning and trying to find some position where I was comfortable, and not all tense and taut. Eventually, I ended up listening to my iPod, hoping that the songs would put me to sleep.

1. Sigur Rós “Saeglópur”

I guess it’s fitting that this means “lost at sea” in Icelandic, as that kind of describes how I feel these days. It’s been over a week since I went to the Sigur Rós concert at Copley Hall and I’m glad I went. I’ve come to the realization that no matter what I lose (whether imagined or real), I’ll always have the music. It took me back to my days as a 3rd year med student wandering the streets of Chicago with no purpose. That year, Sigur Rós came out with their untitled album—(), sometimes referred to as the Bracket album, and on a whim I bought a ticket and checked them out. It was kind of a surreal, almost religious experience. Sigur Rós also makes me think of that winter I spent wandering the Central Coast by myself.

1. Toad the Wet Sprocket “Crowing”

This song always struck me as being about a relationship that failed to happen, because the guy was too broken and shattered to ever show his true feelings. Then again I may be projecting, and it’s kind of funny how I find myself in the same situations over and over and over and over again. But it’s too damn late, and I give up, and it will be yet another long time before I ever think about changing my mind.

1. Toad the Wet Sprocket “Windmills”

The allusion to Don Quixote is actually pretty explicit since the album this song comes from is entitled “Dulcinea.” I think I’ve come to internalize too much of Quixote—always finding myself enmeshed in some irreal world while real events passed me by. And then there’s that line from “The Impossible Dream”, to love, pure and chaste from a far, as I’ve doomed myself to, quite possibly for the rest of my life. For some reason, this song also makes me think about the Altamont Pass in Northern Cali, and about going home to L.A.

1. Death Cab for Cutie “Title and Registration”

This song has sat on my iPod for quite some time, and I’m sure I’ve heard it a few times before, but I never really paid attention to the song lyrics until last month, when I made my pointless drive around eastern San Diego County. This song came up as I made the last few winding turns right before the 76 meets up with the 79 by Lake Henshaw, and the last stanza really grabbed me:

There’s no blame for how our love did slowly fade
And now that it’s gone it’s like it wasn’t there at all
And here I rest where disappointment and regret collide
Lying awake at night

And I’m forced to think about all the times I’ve failed to say how I’ve felt, all the times that fell apart and turned to ash, and somehow, remarkably, I was able to drift off to sleep.

I seem to be running in this card a lot.