So

I've been trying to write something for days. Every time I start I get interrupted by something. Usually that something is me. Yet, how can this be? How can I be interrupting myself as I'm doing something? Aren't I me? How does one go about interrupting oneself at a task? It's probably fair to say that I need to be medicated, which is to say, I'm a living and breathing American alive and functional and with enough money to have a cable and internet subscription. Thus, the majority of my day is based upon distraction, not focusing, just attending to one small thing after another. Thus, perhaps it is no surprise that my intention to write is so often subsumed by other, easier things.

It is harder to create than to consume.

I sprained my ankle this week. It aches when I stand up or walk for more than a minute or so. I am reading a book on immortality of late that seems a bit too optimistic for the state of my ankles.



We watched a movie last night, Another Earth, which sort of gets into that question of, am I me? Essentially, a parallel world is discovered in which everything is exactly the same, and the question becomes, what would we say to ourselves? Of course, we talk to ourselves all the time. We talk to people we know. We, or at least I, often carry on incredibly verbally expressive conversations with random people who upset me, and later, I create scenarios in which some sort of Chuck Norris style ass kicking takes place. This is not to say that I'd deliver an ass-kicking to myself, but rather that I don't know that I'd have anything to say that I hadn't already said before. Why?

And now I'm sitting here writing this. Me. This person right here and now. This contingent phenomenon that is a result of one million choices or so that have shaped me, (and here I realize that me is contingent too, or, at least, we really have know earthly clue wtf is going on with consciousness) and I am wondering if it's what I intended to write. I started writing three other things, but they didn't take. They were like middling colds, or certain types of women.

It is hard to see beyond the end of one's nose. This task is made a bit harder when you have a lengthy nose like myself, though I believe the gist of the quote is largely metaphorical. It's a minor miracle that I'm not yet asleep. But the weekends, when you work for a living, take on a sort of mythic status that must be lived up to. To go to be early, to be tired, is accepting that life is short and brutal, even relative to the doubling we've seen in this century alone. The short and brutal, at least in industrialized nations, is largely meant metaphorically. I am forever becoming confused if things are metaphorical.

But now I'm sitting here, here being the couch on a certain Saturday night, in a certain year, in which the world will or will not end, which makes it no different than any other year whether you're looking at it from a Judeo-Christian ethic or as a secular humanist. Life itself, not just consciousness, is contingent, either a blip on the radar or something beautiful. Perhaps both. But see now, I've strayed, and I still have to walk up the stairs to soothe a crying one year old, and by the time I reach the top of the stairs my ankle is throbbing in a way that makes me actually say "Ow," out loud, in the obnoxious way of people who are trying to draw attention to themselves, except that I'm by myself, standing in the dark at the top of the stairs, which is not to be taken metaphorically, and so the "ow," if that's how one goes about spelling "ow," is real and more important than wondering about comets or Mayan calendars.

I see her at the edge of the crib, crying. I take the pacifier from her left hand and put it back into her mouth. I shush her, and lay her flat in the crib. I put a blanket over her and tuck it around her tiny body. I smooth her hair, and even though I cannot see her clearly, our shapes are but outlines in this dark, ghosts of things past, I know that she can hear me, and I reach down, cupping her cheek, smoothing her fine hair, and I lean close and say, "I love you." And I don't know if she knows what those words mean, or even what they are supposed to mean. I just know that she lies quietly for the moment as I slip back down the stairs and into the ocean.