You’ve Come a Long Way Mickey Mouse –Bev Jafek

Bev Jafek- ???

Mickey has lived his life.

He’s lived his life, seen us, and our place within his life, and reached a certain set of conclusions about existence…the deep meaning of it.

I’m about to step through a major door in my existence on this planet (easy…it’s the only one I’ve ever been on, and the only one I ever will be on). Once I pass through this door, I feel that how I have lived up to that point ( the point where I pass through the door) in my life will be re-focused and my set of conclusions that I feel I have reached so far in my life will be jarred.

This is a great thing.

We all need to be jarred…shaken and disturbed.

It mixes the oil with the vinegar.

But then there are those that are never shaken.

I have a certain fascination with people who work in parking garage ticket taking booths.

I stress over their lives. I worry about them in their little boxes. It’s easy for me to think that they could find another job…but could they really? I mean, has their life been lead to a point where they fit within a predetermined mold that only allows them to sit in this small box and collect parking garage tickets? How does this happen?

And then I think…”do they enjoy what they are doing?”

They have a job…they are making some money…

I think that I also overly my intellectual curiosities onto them.

Maybe they don’t want to “live a life” or they don’t know how to “live a life” and all they really know is their life in the box, and that box is comfortable to them.

I just find their existence really interesting.

Mickey says –

“And then I understood the enormity I had become I was like you. My life was lived on a line parallel to yours, but my capacity to reflect my own essence was so horribly perfect. I had discovered, as only an image can, that all your ability to think and feel is based on truncated images. What an uncomfortable creature you are – how prone to obsession, myopia, how divided from all you survey, what a watcher, defender, conquer. And so it is with love – the more distant I was from her, the more incited I became.

Them I truly saw the world you had created. For you are the species who creates a world to invite images. I found that vehicles, parks, whole streets, even cities had been created to incite images. It was astounding – I now understood what your kind had been feeling, what so much of your world was intended for. I became fascinated with the dialectics of people alone – driving in cars, hidden away with their books, sitting in their homes, drinking in whatever corner the world allowed. For I now knew a human secret: When alone, people have a truly horrifying hunger for another person, a hunger beyond satisfaction, a life of images held like a hand of cards against fate”

What a wonderful set of lines Jafek has written.