Bred this way - the birth was only a final step. An ideal citizen in your eyes as mine dissolve until reflectively alone. Formal disguise. Formality unto black tie eternity.
Am I a true believer in etiquette? Well, if such a creed lacks honesty, it only does so in the way a painting of the sun contains no flames. And would you have me burn the whole strange world down?
Always, it seems, I go back to the lessons of my American education - not what was learned but how it was. Everything, still, nearly reduced to a game of rote memorization. See me reciting, shakily, my lines until they can balance themselves, off the cuff, in real-time. What am I getting at here? The criticism I'm always swallowing back without spitting up?
I've infiltrated the serious world. A people pleaser with an existentialist streak - oh the opposing stances of the doing and the knowing! Stand down, does that mean sitting at a desk? Stand up - does that mean eternal proximity to the ultimate temptation: restlessness?
The status seekers pyramid themselves up - less and less to converge upon but the final point. It's the base of the pyramid that offers the best riches - and I don't even mean the buried chambers of some pharaoh's gold and bones.
Perhaps I am just the latest version of what it means to be a surveyor. In a world where all the land has been gobbled up and assigned, really all that's left to survey are different paths of life. I've stalled on my journey because I've sought ride-alongs on every journey I've come across. What is this, what is that? My curiosity gives the most roundabout directions!
And I know I'll never be a great landowner living like this (or "pathowner" - to stay with the previous analogy). But my curiosity has not so much an acquisitional sense as it does an experiential one - but mostly it has an intellectual one. Living not fully - but spread out in a way better to indulge my many questions, to increase my understanding. That is how I have lived and, my guess would be, how I will continue to live. Perpetually in the vicinity while maintaining a polite distance.