Christian A. Camerota

“So if you wake up with the sunrise, and all your dreams are still as new,
And happiness is what you need so bad, girl, the answer lies with you.”

This song popped into my head the other day and I realized that for as long as I’ve loved Zeppelin and as much as I’ve listened to them over the years, I pretty much have no idea what any of the lyrics are to any of their songs. I think it’s largely due to the fact that Robert Plant has that weird, screaching way of singing things that distorts anything and everything he’s trying to say, but also is the essence of his awesomeness.

Anyway, this song is kick ass and has a great slide solo by Jimmy Page that I used to try to emulate back when I was learning how to play guitar at age 16. Fortunatley, I’ve grown up a little since then and have abandoned all hope of ever playing quite like Jimmy Page…probably much to the joy of my neighbors’ aural sensibilities.

But, the reason I feel compelled to write about this song is that only recently have I looked up and thought about the lyrics to it. “What is and What Should Never Be” I think is an allusion to imagination and the wide void between what exists in our minds and what actually happens in reality.

My explanation of it is much more trite and reductive than the eloquent way Plant has of putting it, but I think I’m at least close to the meaning.

The idea hits home with me because it expresses the discontinuity that’s been frustrating me lately. I can’t reconcile the opposites in my life: the love of things creative and the pull of monetary necessity, the need for companionship and the inevitable desire to be free, beer or whiskey, shit or get off the pot, etc.

It sucks to reduce everything to dualisms like that, but I think we do this so often because usually we’re forced to pick one thing or the other. We don’t have the luxury of picking neither, or all of the above.

Things get really shitty when we’re forced to make these kinds of choices as they relate to the direction of our lives. It’d be stupid of us to say that we didn’t all want to be wildly successful. It’d also be stupid to say that we didn’t all think we’re destined for greatness. I mean, let’s be honest: we all love ourselves a lot, even if we doubt ourselves a lot, too. I have yet to meet a person that doesn’t think they’re just the cat’s friggin pajamas.

But, at the same time, many of us also suck at making ourselves happy. For as much as we love ourselves and are taught that individuality is important, and that we’re supposed to follow our dreams, and put ourselves first, and all that fecal nonsense…how many of us actually do that?

Few. Very, very few.

Instead, we subject ourselves to the invisible pull of what propriety dictates. We make ourselves need 2.3 kids and a BMW and Starbucks in the morning, even if we know we don’t really want these things. Some chalk it up to consumerism and advertising and cultural norms…I chalk it up to us being pussies and not listening to our hearts enough.

And the worst part is that I’m more guilty of it than anyone. When it comes down to it, I know what I want. I want to be outside a lot, skiing and hiking and running and rolling around in the grass and climbing trees and pissing into the wind. I want to drink really good wine and eat ripe avocados and go deep sea fishing off the California coast on an obscenely large and expensive sailboat, and scream loudly whenever I feel like it, and dance naked in broad daylight. I want to write brilliant books and read even more brilliant ones, and play guitar and sing inspiringly in front of people without inhibition, and put them in awe of me. I want to be happy all the time and not feel guilty about taking time off when I need it, and to sleep in some days, and wake up at the ass crack of dawn on others, and generally make the absolute most out of the one shot I get at living life properly.

And, in spite of knowing all of this, I don’t do any of it. Instead, I wake up at 6:15 every morning to an alarm that annoys me, stagger over to the toilet and piss stale, yellow urine from my dehydrated body into an ugly-colored toilet, splashing some carelessly on the seat. Then I boil water for coffee that doesn’t taste nearly as good as it should for the price I paid for it, I eat the world’s most unexciting bowl of cereal with skim milk (when I really want chocolate milk in it), and watch the morning news that runs the same maddening series of reports on the traffic Hotspots and Britney’s rehab every single day. I loaf into the shower that’s always just a little too hot or too cold, spend too much time washing my privates and not enough time washing my face, stand resting my head against the soap-scummy wall letting the hard-water run over me, and watch the soap, the water, and many of my dreams flow down the drain.

What’s funny is that that’s honestly how I feel and it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it should. I’m too ok with the fact that I’m not making life everything I want it to be. And I think the same’s true for many of us.

And, clearly, this is all “what is and what should never be.” Things are as they are, even if they shouldn’t be that way.

But, I think there’s hope…and I think it comes when we finally get fed up enough to get off our asses and make things the way they should be, just like Plant says: if you wake up with the sunrise, and your dreams are still as new, and happiness is what you need so bad- the answer lies with you.

When we want badly enough to be happy, we’ll make it so.

And I’m getting close.