Remain

On this beautiful Summer evening almost all of my flat-mates came back in full sunshine from Fusion festival, a weird place well known throughout western Europe for non-stop electronic music and unrestrained drug consumption (but I've heard gossips that some people got also drunk in good old style).

They poured out from the overcrowded van together with a pile of tents, backpacks, crates with food they didn't eat and drinks they didn't drink. Sun-tanned, joyfull, tired, young. All at most in their early twenties.

I was so stressed out with they arrival, predicting the wave of babbling and laughing about how great it was there, that I escaped to library with a strong resolve to write an article I was preparing for most of the day.

My netbook and me: overworked, well organized, boring, in my almost thirties.

I don't remember when for the last time I felt so terribly lonely.

And when for the last time I felt so outcasted with my decision about not drinking, smoking, taking drugs and having occasional sex. Not even mentioning being vegan..

I remember times when being Straight Edge I saw as something cool. Not really in this sXe scene meaning, because when I got to it for the first time some time in very beginning of 2001 I was living in a small town near Warsaw and knew no one who would also be sXe who I could join in a good, clean fun.
It was fun just for the reason to show, how mature I am comparing to all the early "adults", freshly allowed to buy alcohol and cigarettes, I was the one who didn't give a damn. I was strong, proud and an outsider anyway, and with this a bit over it all, so that was yet another point on my map of creating my adult personality.

After no more than a year I dropped it with no regrets and came back some years ago being already more mature and experienced I've ever wished I'd be. And stronger than ever before.

Hanging around in Animal Rights circles makes things easy. So many people share the idea, combining it with veganism and anti-consumerism and so on. But we are so few.
There is whole big World outside full of young, political oriented people (or at least those, who think so about themselves or those, who make you believe they have a potential, that some good things can develop from them).
They all want to party hard. More or less often, but the whole idea of being FREE from any use seems so abstract and mystic for them, that sometimes makes me feel like I've fallen from another dimension.

I drink a tea from a fresh peppermint leaves. It makes a mood go up. At least just a bit.