There is a battle amongst those involved in the trades and markets of the downtowns and uptowns and places where the barters of life are arranged: “I am an idealist,” a number can be heard saying, “but have adjusted successfully to the exigencies and realities of life.” “Ha,” I think. “And I am a realist who tries with whatever sinews and fibers are left, to hold out a daily idealism with which to inform my life.”

The utopists, the what-if people who preach the wonder-fulness of the never-will-be and look past the whatever is, they make me feel…mundane…common. They tell me how the best of all lives would be. And I, grubbing for the roots of today, of the hows of how I got here, want to believe I am no more spoiled than I am; that I can recover, and move beyond who I am today.

Those self-proclaimed idealists, those pains in my reality, want to own idealism, want to look past today to a future which they proclaim as theirs, as if today is not happening, as if all the todays are not the future. And I, left gasping, want to know who will make this fantasy come to be, and why it is not time to begin: right here, right now!