friends say that i spend too much time thinking. you can always catch me staring out the window, oblivious to my surroundings, lost in the arcane, labyrinthine inner working of mind. some might call it an absence seizure, except that it lasts way too long.

at this point in time, while I am still haunted by the concept of "normalcy," vaguely represented by the Horatio Alger myth, AKA the American Dream, I realized that the choices I've made have driven me far down the veritable Path Less Taken. Which is not to say that I can never run back to the fateful fork in the road, only that it would be a considerable effort to do so.

This is all well and good, except for the lamentable fact that I am a lazy bastard, and the bizarre mental and temporal contortions I regularly perform, as complicated as they appear, are really (often failed) attempts at cutting corners. (As J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, "Shortcuts make for long delays")

In other words, there is something absurdly perverse in me that believes the shortest distance between two points is completely non-linear, and crooked as hell.

Who'd've ever thunk it?

Of course, I'm really more transparent than I'd like to be.

So. Like I said. Normalcy does haunt me. There is a part of me that is irritated by the fact that more and more people in my life are entering the house-in-the-suburbs/2-car/2.5-children lifestyle. Now, I know that time is non-linear, but it is annoying to be constantly bombarded by stimuli supporting the opposite. And while I'd love to, like Hobbes (the tiger, not the philosopher), ask "Who are we racing?", unfortunately Calvin (the kid, not the cleric) keeps waking me up, reminding me that I'll never win the race by lying around all day.

Of course, what no one ever seems to mention is that the finish line is a little thing they call Death and, frankly, I don't see what the hurry is. (And the sick, sad irony is, because of the way our culture has been perverted by the American Dream, I think more and more people reach this finish line and realize that they are not ready to cross it. I think that Death has wrongly become something to fear. I'm not saying we should all embrace Death like a suicide cult drinking Kool-Aid and wearing Nike crosstrainers, but I think we should stop treating it like some kind of pathology. As the second law of thermodynamics unequivocally states, it is inevitable.)

This verbose realization could be more economically summarized by B's philosophy: "Fuck it."

So. I have this scarcely tested belief that, no matter who deeply connected you are to another person, no matter how many people you surround yourself with, you are ultimately alone. No one (sometimes not even you) can really decipher all your thoughts and feelings, and it is inordinantly difficult to articulate them to someone else. Ultimately, we live in our minds. Everything else is not necessarily reality. (Whatever reality might be, though.)

Of course this is biased by the fact that I haven't been in a long-term relationship for quite a while, and my subsequent attempts to establish one have all met with miserable and sometimes catastrophic failure.

I must say, though, that I haven't been going about this in a very intelligent manner. While I like to rail at Fate, I recognize that in many ways, I have been sabotaging myself.

But, really, what I'm looking for is more basic than that. I realize that my fatal flaw at this point in time is that I cannot trust anyone. I mean, I trust my friends and family to a reasonable degree, but I recognize that I always stop short of trusting anyone completely. Unjustly, I feel that disappointed is inevitable, so why freight friendships with my unnecessary baggage?

Still, yeah, there's something missing. I don't know how to change this in myself. I do think of Henry J. Stimson's quote: "The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him" (which I'm sure applies to the opposite gender as well.) But the risks of trusting someone like that absolutely frightens me.

So. My task is clear. Only time will tell.