Can I kick it? No, you can't.

I was out earlier doing stuff, when I realized that I would need to go to the grocery store. So, I head over to the 24-hour place, and I start thinking.

I need to go get food so I don't starve to death.

Now, more than ever, I am increasingly famine-resistant, but I aim the car towards the grocery. I think, here I am just crawling around on the face of the earth like a bug, no more important, dealing with the same biological needs and imperatives, and with scarcely more true effect on the universe than the ants and roaches. This is about the time I start laughing in the car.

I laughed because I rationally size this type of thinking up as belonging to a depressed human. But I don't feel depressed. I feel pretty good. Things could be better, but I'm fully aware that they could be one hell of a lot worse. I size it up to trying to know my place.

I know that rationally very little of what most people do makes one damned bit of difference in the grand scheme, but I really like that people still do their best anyway. I think it's cool that some people live to help others, and that it is possible to, in some small way, improve, if only temporarily, another person's outlook.

I don't really expect to be remembered for much of anything, but that's not a big deal. I expect that there will be a few people that will miss me when I'm gone, and maybe for a generation or two, my name will be occasionally spoken, and certain ridiculous stories will be told. Then, like all of us, save the Lincolns, Jeffersons, Shakespeares and Stalins, as a tangible actual person, I will completely cease to be.

Why doesn't that bother me, since I've taken all of this (i.e. so very little) effort to think about it? It looks sad when I read it, but it doesn't make me feel that way. It doesn't really make me feel like anything at all, to be honest. It feels like a simple fact.

Christ, I've managed to self-aggrandize while simultaneously making myself completely irrelevant.

Sunday, July 01, 2007