It's hard you know, living in the free world and I'm not the first to have said it. In fact, Martin Sexton said it or more precisely ... he sang it. He sang it with feeling and I knew just exactly what he meant when he said it. I didn't know I'd start writing a blog entitled by it at the time.

I mean, it's counter intuitive, right? Most of us were raised on THIS side of the iron curtain, in this very very free world and taught that it's just great to be free, Free, FREE! (Can you hear my voice rising maniacally?) What was hard we were taught is to be not free. Enslaved. Restricted. Imprisoned.

Birds are free. We're supposed to want to be as free as a bird. Birds make being free look like fun. Busy and free. Let's all just be that. Busy as a bird and just as free and just as freaking happy, twittering away like we mean it. And yet ... I heard Martin sing those words about it being hard, living in the free world and I saw the truth in them immediately.

It's hard to be faced with umpteenzillion choices every second of one's life. It's hard to have the marketing devils know this and to have one's sleeve tugged at every second of one's day ... "pssst, buy this, it's bigger, better, faster and sexier" One just wants to swat at them like a man at gnats. One wants to, I don't know, move to an abbey and live in a small cell with nothing in it but a hard bed and a cross on the wall just so one doesn't have to live in a swarm of marketing gnats tugging at one's very free sleeves.

So it's hard to be free. It's hard to make choices. Moral choices, choices about what flavor of cheese to put on one's cracker, choices about what color to paint one's bedroom, choices about what CD to put in the player. They define us these choices but sometimes one must simply and honestly shrug. "I don't know" says the shrug. Velveeta will be fine. Cheddar would be finer. A stilton with a good chutney would be even finer than that but must I choose? I'm busy brushing my teeth or taking a whiz or capturing my thoughts in a blog. I can't choose a cheese right now. Let me be. Let me not choose. Let me mow the lawn and leave the choice of cheese for another time. Maybe munster. but I can't be bothered. Well maybe havarti with dill. Maybe havarti said with that adorable indian clipping of speech and dill. Maybe muenster.

I don't really think Martin was complaining about having to choose a cheese though. I'm being trivial. Martin was probably standing on a curb in Harvard square with his guitar and trying to decide between buying a sixpack of his favorite beer or saving it towards rent. He was probably realizing that beer and rent are mutually exclusive for some people and that he might be one of them so if only, if ONLY he didn't have to make that choice. If only someone could make that choice for him every minute of every day. If only a huge hand could come down out of heaven every time he felt his feet moving towards the packy and grab him by the scruff of the neck and flick his patooti and set him down facing the opposite direction. The direction labelled home and rent and yet another passerby enthralled with the sounds coming from his guitar and reaching into his pocket for some change to toss into his guitar case.

I don't really know Martin. I don't know him now and I didn't know him when he busked his way through Harvard Square but this is what I feel like I know about him after listening to a few of his albums. Maybe he'll disabuse me some day ... diss and abuse me for having shared my erroneous notions of where his song came from. More likely he'll just say "it's only art Bri, take it where you want to go!" He just has to be as cool as his music.