On Not Living In The Real America

I live in Brooklyn, in New York City, but I don’t live in ‘real’ America. I’m surrounded by artifice and fantasy; specters and ghosts walk the streets. The sidewalks beneath my feet are insubstantial; it is a miracle they are able to sustain my corporeal weight. The buildings around me have been plucked straight from the pages of comic books; I walk through their walls effortlessly. There is no English spoken here; merely an incomprehensible gibberish consisting of many alien tongues.

Here, no one works for a living; no one has to get up in the morning, or evening, to go to work and earn an honest day’s, or night’s, living. Magic money is automatically deposited into our virtual bank accounts–presumably as a reward for our insubstantiality. We do not pay taxes (state or city or Federal), grocery and utility bills, rent, mortgages, road tolls, parking tickets, subway fares, alimonies, school tuition, and all of the rest. Our lives are expense-free; we do not need to balance budgets. We do not deal with bosses and workplaces and co-workers; we do not deal with workplace conditions, good or bad. We are never fired; we merely receive the occasional raise.

This is a conflict-free land; there are no disputes, legal, political, or personal. When all is unreal, what could we possibly be quibbling about? Thus, our social and economic interactions with our fellow spirits move along smoothly on friction-free planes, with differing needs and desires effortlessly reconciled with each other. Solomon would have been an incompetent adjudicator here; there would be no work for him; his skills would rust from disuse.

Our children are fantasies too; they do not possess substantiality beyond our dreams. We do not worry about their welfare, their schooling, their moral and material education. We care little if they go missing for a while; they are not ‘real’ after all. They do not feel pain, and neither do we. We are free from parental anxiety, the greatest blessing of all.

We have few aspirations for our lives; all has been given to us, and our lives consist merely of picking through the goodies, selecting and choosing which clothes to wear, which lunch dates to go on, which movies and which plays to see. We take vacations occasionally, venturing out into the ‘real’ America, but the hard edges of reality drive us–all too soon–back into the welcoming arms of this La La Land. We cower under the blankets at night sometimes, offering thanks and prayers for not being subjected to reality the way so many of our fellow citizens are, unfairly and cruelly.

Our health is perfect; we do not fall ill, and die. We do not worry about that pain in the chest, that nagging sore that won’t go away. Our families do not have to pay medical bills; they do not have to sit by our bedsides, cremate us, or lower us into the ground. Grief is besides the point; why mourn for what is not real?

We are uncertain how this zone of fantasy came about, how it managed to separate itself from the mainland of reality. But we do not question our good fate; we merely draw upon our benedictions. And plot, endlessly, to keep reality away from our lives, from this coast, far away in the hinterlands where it belongs.

Note: This post was originally published at samirchopra.com under the same title.