“Freedom to me is the luxury of being able to follow the path of the heart. I think that’s the only way that you maintain the magic in your life, that you keep your child alive. Freedom is necessary for me in order to create, and if I don’t create I don't feel alive.”
“I was a free man in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive.”
-Joni Mitchell
If you follow me on social media or know me, you might be aware that I recently took a trip to the Netherlands. Specifically, Amsterdam and its surrounding areas. I didn’t stay in the city because I am not a rich person. I stayed just outside the city — a short bike ride away (about half an hour or so) from a subway station, and from there I’d go to Amsterdam. It was a lifelong trip I’ve always wanted to take for a variety of reasons — not just the usual stereotypical things people go there for, like weed and pussy. Although those things are definitely nice, and when I was 13 and watching movies like Deuce Bigelow 2 that was obviously a big deal to me, but that is ultimately not why I went there. In fact, where I live (Canada), our marijuana laws are actually way better than Amsterdam’s. And you can easily get prostitutes here as well, so that’s not why I went. I had a whole itinerary and I went for stuff that has nothing to do with weed and pussy, like art museums, the Anne Frank house, eating pancakes, the architecture, the bodies of water everywhere, walking around and thinking about life, writing, talking to people, getting into adventures, just being a person. Shit like that. It feels dumb to explain why I’ve always wanted to go to Amsterdam when I try to write about it like this, but that’s really it lol. I’m a simple guy, I like cheese, bookstores, cafes, and the European way of life in general. Amsterdam to me is kinda like if you took the best part of Italy (Venice), and somehow made it even better and multiplied all the bodies of water and canals and everything.
I’ve been a bit reluctant to talk about this, because things are so awful for so many right now. Nobody wants to hear or see someone else doing well, and it can be truly sickening to see that kind of display on someone’s social media profile or whatever. I know for me personally, it’s hard to take a person too seriously when those are the kinds of things they post regularly. It suggests to me that the person has no real thought or reason to be listened to, they are usually all surface because the trips they’re taking are unearned. They’re just shitting their parents’ money, investing in their Instagram feeds so their other rich friends will like them more and think they’re more interesting than they really are. It kind of displays to the world a very shallow, two dimensional perspective of life. Anyone that has a picture of themselves sipping from a wine glass at some restaurant in Europe with a pinky finger up deserves to die of starvation in the coming collapse😂. When those types of people are suffering, that’s nature healing itself. So yeah, don’t worry: I’m not one of those tone deaf rich people and that’s not what this post is primarily about. My life isn’t even that good. I will get into why that is in a moment. I won’t get into too many details about the trip itself, but I do want to use it as a jumping off point to get to what I really want to talk about in this one, which is the concept of freedom. It feels like something almost no one I know has.
The other recent development in my life is that I have been listening to Joni Mitchell a lot lately, and reading a bunch of her interviews. To be completely honest with you, I never really liked her work prior to this. All the years I’ve tried listening to her music I found it very unenjoyable and hard to get into. But for some reason, lately I have been really connecting with her work. And her as a person: I find myself relating to her and a lot of the stuff she says in some of her older interviews, especially with regards to creating art, being alone, enjoying nature, and life in a really simple way. The tension that presented itself in her life between her massive success and the person she truly was before all the fame, etc, is something that really fascinates me, and I relate very strongly to it as I continue to work more and lose more of my free time. I’m not sure why, but that’s just life I guess: I could probably never understand it in the same way when I was younger. Sometimes the messages in art only hit you when you’re ready.
One of the recurring themes I’ve noticed with Joni Mitchell is the idea of freedom. I’ve included those two quotes of hers at the top of this one because they have been resonating with me a lot lately. What I learned when returning to Canada from Europe is that I am not free. I mean, I knew it already, but it really hit home when experiencing the contrast so starkly like that. In fact, to take it a step further: I am not only not free, I am not even alive. At the moment, I feel like I am merely just a dead man inhabiting a dude’s body who used to be alive. Now, obviously I’m exaggerating a bit when I say stuff like this. But if you’ve lost your spirit, how else can you explain what is happening to you other than death? Even though you’re alive and breathing, you’re not alive and well, so it is a form of death. Not the same, but pretty much the same, if you catch my drift. There is a clear difference between living and merely surviving (as Sammy Davis Jr. would say lol). It’s one of the things I find so fascinating about Joni Mitchell the singer/songwriter versus Joni Mitchell the famous person in pop culture; the irony of her becoming so famous is that it was the complete opposite of what led to her becoming famous in the first place, which is her childlike wonder, living life on the fringes, having time to observe life and people, free time to write and pursue thoughts, etc.
Something I kept hearing from people when I returned from my trip was some variation of, “You look so happy,” or “You look so good!” I am not a handsome man by any stretch of the imagination, so hearing these types of comments came as a complete surprise. But I suspect it’s because I actually looked alive for once. It’s almost like I was a slave that was emancipated, but only for like 2 weeks for some strange clerical reason to do with paperwork, and when I got back people were wondering what freedom was like because I looked so much happier and they never saw me look like that before. And this is precisely what I mean by living vs survival: over there I was living life as it really should be lived, by following the heart. If I get hungry, I stop and eat somewhere. If I want to sit in a park and read a book for 2 or 3 hours, I will do that. If I want to go to a cafe and be around people or talk to some Dutch girls, I will do that. But here, I’m dead: I have to work a job that requires me to travel from one end of the city to the other, I’m in traffic for like 3 hours a day, there is no mental energy or time leftover for me to even think about fun or “following my heart” and goofy Joni Mitchell things of that nature. I gotta wake up at 6am, rush and get my ass to work, do the whole day, rush and get my ass back home, have like 2 hours of free time to myself, and then take an edible or something just so I can get some goddamn rest and not think about how much I am wasting all of my potential and life and how much better life could be and all the other demons bothering me and so forth.
It’s hard for me to really explain this one properly for those that haven’t tasted both slavery and freedom before, but I will continue to try. The other day while walking (during the tiny amount of free time I have left these days) I had the thought, “The anything can happen-ness of life is gone.” That’s what I mean by all of this: over there, there was real magic. There was genuine possibility in life. It really felt like anything could happen, and I don’t mean in a dangerous way, I mean in a good way. Like that feeling you get on New Years Eve in the city for some reason. To give you an idea of what I mean by “magic”: at one point I was walking around and found a movie theatre. When I talked to the dude at the counter, I learned that the recent Dragonball Z film was screening, and it was starting in 10 minutes exactly. So of course, I bought a ticket and watched it and had this hilarious experience I did not wake up that day expecting to have. It sounds silly to use something so stupid as a Dragonball Z movie as an example of magic in life, I know, but I swear to you: there were a million moments just like that during my trip that felt like god himself was pushing things in the right direction for me.
It’s way too much to get into, but it just felt magical, like I was really living my life for once. Anything could happen, was a real feeling I had. At one point Dave Chappelle stepped into a local comedy club unannounced to record an episode of his podcast. I got laid almost every day I was there. Some Dutch girl stopped me at one point to tell me she liked my outfit. And by the way, I’m not just talking about the good stuff here as “magical.” Far from it: there were times I got so lost I got genuinely scared and worried about my safety due to being a solo traveler. But even THAT turned out to be tons of fun. I was riding my bike and talking to cows in the country and shit like that, I had the feeling that it was how life should truly be lived. A man should not be in a box or sitting on a computer. Modern day men have a sort of self-inflicted captivity and it should not be this way. He should be outdoors and writing in a notebook if he has to jot something down. He should be so busy living his life he barely has time to “google” something, I mean, what the fuck is a google? Fuck that, it removes all the magic in your life. Sometimes not knowing something is better than knowing every single detail. Who gives a fuck if you don’t know something? That’s life.
There were times where all I did was walk the earth. And I mean, truly, that’s all I did for several hours. Just walk and walk and look at everything and admire how beautiful life around me was. I did not know I was capable of walking that much. I walked so damn much my legs started hurting in ways I didn’t know they could hurt. But once again, like I said: that’s what living should be. I even enjoyed the pains that came with that stuff. (Side note: I am reminded of this Jordan Peterson quote I heard recently where he said, “You might lose your body out there in the world, but if you stay here, you lose your soul.” I’m not the biggest fan of his, but I could relate very strongly to that line).
Here, I have to sort of shrink who I really am in order just to survive. It’s almost like I’m not even a person, I’m just a guy who got sent to a war for some reason I don’t even fully know, and all I’m doing is trying to stay alive even though life isn’t even that good. If I have a cool idea or what I think could be a good comedy bit or creative thing I’d like to work on, I don’t have the luxury to pursue it and waste the day away enjoying my imagination. It feels like straight up torture to have the knowledge that life could be so much better, and here I am stuck with this average one instead. There is something about North American infrastructure and life that feels very poisonous and fraudulent to me; this is simply just not the way it should be.
I know I might come across as whiny or whatever, and I have heard the usual arguments against this type of stuff before, such as, “Well, what do you expect? To have a life of luxury and easiness all the time? You have to work in order to pay for that privilege,” and so forth. I am not saying people that make these types of arguments are wrong, and there can be a value to working hard and so on. All I’m saying is that it should not be an either or situation: a person should not have to feel like they are trapped and have to say no to their own freedom just to make money. A person shouldn’t have to feel guilty just for enjoying their life when they do get free time. I really hate that this is the system we’ve chosen for ourselves, and if I could grant everyone freedom I would do it. I don’t think I will ever be as happy as I was in Amsterdam. Hopefully I can get away to Europe again sometime soon, and for a lot longer next time, because this way of life is slowly killing me.