By
George S Geisinger
The locust people, the Too Many to Count, are everywhere around me now.
I can't find any other conclusion about life to arrive at, about my surroundings.
I have no hiding place, except sitting alone in my suite and writing in my notebook. There is really no one to understand me at a gut level around here anymore. My instincts are too young for the crowd around here to comprehend. I would do a lot better to live around a younger generation, like my own generation, if there were an environment like that anywhere around, for me to transfer to.
But there's not.
They don't speak my language here, and sometimes I'd like to speak that language with someone, just to be free to speak my mind freely, for a change. Many of them say they care about me, and maybe they do, at that, but most don't seem to understand what I have to say, whenever I dare to let my hair down at all.
I end up perpetually struggling at the impossible process of being me.
I always have to be careful I don't offend someone.
That's laborious.
There's no hiding place for me now, except for when I'm alone in my suite, where there are not those whom I have to apply to, to gain understanding with, by using the few, carefully chosen words to express myself, the way I've always had to do here. Everywhere I go, there are the locust people, the Too Many to Count, who refuse to understand, who cannot understand, who are offended by my very rhetoric, not to mention my point that I'm trying to make.
My Spiritual beliefs and my sexuality are a stench in people's nostrils around here.
It's not only unnerving, it's debilitating.
Everyone needs to have someone to let their hair down with, if they can only find someone who can except that sort of casual behavior out of them. All I know is that I have fewer and fewer people to relate to as time goes by. I find my plight to be one of isolation and lack of communication, from all three of my closest friends.
The only shield people I held on to, to get away from the Too Many to Count, the locust people, were the Program people, or some of the employees around here. Now, I don't even dare utilize those venues. That's become plain to me. Those folks in those places have turned on me significantly, and demonstrated to me plainly enough, that they can no longer be trusted to treat me with deference, without taking unkind offense at me, in one way or another.
The Program people are too dangerous to my health, just as the locust people are.
It's a lonely, desolate place to be.
I told a joke in public the other day, and my closest friend among the staff looked at me with fear in her eyes. That's what was there. Fear. Now, I feel that I've offended her significantly, and don't understand how to recover my place with her at all. I leave her alone. She was my closest friend on the staff, and now I leave her alone. I've ruined my place with her so significantly, and sometimes wonder whether some of my arguments with my editor are chasing her off, too.
There are very few Human Beings left, who naturally agree with my position about very many things at all. I find that those that do know, who seem to understand, are less accessible to me than everyone else is around here. There are those who agree with me, who have also been required to perform with a code of ethics and code of behavior they adhere to.
They work here.
It's part of their job to get along with me.
There are only the locust people, and the only one I have to talk to is one or other of them. He's my brother, my sponsor, or my editor, and if I let fly with any of the street dialect I have a tendency to resort to in my speech, anyone I have access to say something to, only gets offended at my rhetoric, and never even considers my point, much less comprehends it, in the first place.
The only recourse I can see at the moment is to keep writing for my audience, wherever, whenever, and whomever they might happen to be. It is only important for me to continue to create a body of work. I continue to feel I'm compelled to write what I'm writing, that I'm addressing a specific audience. That my audience is not necessarily my brother, my sponsor, or my editor.
My most significant audience is somewhere else, maybe at some other time altogether. I don't think I can travel in those circles at the moment. I think I can know now, what the Native Americans were going through, when they all of a sudden found out how ruthless the locust people were around them; of how the locust people would not permit the Human Beings to practice things like their communing with their ancestors, which was their Spiritual Life.
I have had seen visions and dreamed dreams. I am a shaman. If I tell any of these people about that, they'll be certain to lock me up, as a derelict and a rebel, too dangerous to have on the streets, or walking the halls of assisted living. The locust people talk a good game, but their hearts are empty, like their words.
They talk about their god all the time, and yet they fear death.
A single word of differing perspective about their god will do the trick. It sets them off right away. Also, if I try saying anything suggestive to any of the attractive women around here – and it seems like there are nothing but old women and old men around here, except for a few staff – it seems that all those people will shut you out, at the very mention of their god, or at the very mention of any sexual suggestion, or the mention of any sort of Spiritual belief other than their own.
It's a lonely road to travel.