truth

I usually post in the evenings after a long day of work, but yesterday I worked until 10pm (Michigan time) and then just wanted to sit back and relax. So no coherent thoughts. Just some late night tv (Conan's list of porn titles were so good - one after another, funnier and funnier) and a beer.

I am throwing together a piece that is actually turning out pretty well for an application that's due today (Friday) in 8 hours. It's all in one computer, but now I have to notate it and make it look pretty.

I'm slowly devising a new morality that makes it a sin to be anything less than totally aware of your existence and mortality. Empty clichés like "live each day to its fullest" and "be all that you can be" really suck the life out of life. Clichés are the devil's work; they numb our brains with empty truths that end up desensitizing us to life itself. And numb to the weight of our existence, we follow the path before us, walking step by step in the footsteps ahead. And then, in the last few moments of life, we catch a glimpse of its meaning. Finally. I'm trying to go past those words and really imagine what it would mean like to have this be my last thought, this be my last meal, this be my last piece.

So I'm working on some new maxims, soon to be clichés, at which point I'll invent some new ones.

* Live each moment as if it could get stuck in an infinite time loop
* Live each moment as if, when you die, they take a random, 15-minute sample of your waking life and use that to preserve your legacy to the universe
* All we have is our existence; all we know is our existence. Work to know death: it is real but unknowable.

The only universal truth that we have is that we exist. The freedom that we have is how to deal with that. I'm not one for believing in fairy tales: cheap, easy explanations. The reality is so much larger, and if you want to know the whole of things, you have to let go of the parts.

I took a great walk yesterday on the lake, almost out to the edge of the ice berg. Great footage; I'll show you later.