I've Seen Things. . . .

I'm close to quitting, close to being done.  People disappoint me. . . or worse. . . and I'm tired of embarrassing myself here with my confessions and failures, my whining and lying, my manias and depressions.  

But it is mostly other people.  

I don't know what I expected, really.  They have their own movies in which they are the lead, their lives swirling around and about them.  By and large, though, that life is kept inside their heads without expression beyond telling a friend what they did last night in twenty words or less.  They keep the music playing, the t.v., anything for distraction.  

Maybe I should do that. 

I got a text from my old college roommate.  Things aren't going so well for him, he said, and he is going to assisted living.  

"Next!"

We all wander into that land of quiet desperation, but the vast majority of people are still far away from such terrain, and so. . . .

Our lives are dependent on others more than we ever guess.  Unless you live alone in the wilderness building your own shelter, crafting your own furniture, collecting your own water, making your own foot trails and collecting your own food, creating your own fire, etc.  

I don't know why I continue this blog, really.  It is just a yelling into the void, it seems, like crying out for meaning only to hear "the cold twinkling of a distant star" in response.  And like the protagonist of Crane's "The Open Boat," one shakes one's fist at the heavens shouting, "But I love myself."  

It is, perhaps, probable that a man in this situation, impressed with the lack of concern of the world, should see the many faults in his own life. They may rest badly in his mind, and he may wish for another chance. The difference between right and wrong seems all too clear to him then. And he understands that if he were given another opportunity, he would improve his conduct and his words.

 I wrote back to my friend a response that was, of course, inadequate.  What can one say?  It isn't fair?  We live in an uncaring, unjust universe?  There is no succor in that.  

My mother rises, struggles to the kitchen where she will spend most of her day sitting in the same chair.  She is a daily reminder.  Hour by hour.  Minute by minute.  

I'll probably keep writing.  I don't know.  I feel like a door to door salesman in a neighborhood where nobody's home, a Willy Loman with a valise full of heavy dreams.  

My friend and I lived large, eschewing the middle, searching for the boundaries, and the rewards were large enough that in the telling they sound like lies.  As the android/humanoid, Roy, says in the climactic scene from "Blade Runner."

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."

 I put that in my response but left unsaid,

"And all those moments will be lost in time. . . like tears in the rain."

I'll probably keep posting here.  I don't know.  If I do, it is only for myself, for as I said, people disappoint me.

Mostly they are quiet about it, though.  I, of course, disappoint myself publicly here on The Daily Blog.  

Selavy.  

Selah.