Barrelling down the I-5 at the speed of sound, blasting my speakers at maximum, the music courses down my veins, reverberates in my chest, and gets me right there in the heart.

I can no longer imagine life without this miracle of modern technology.

A dash of red hot salsa and a dollop of vodka angered up my blood this evening, and I fantasized about invading small, technologically deficient countries and declaring myself emperor. Too much ethanol and too much capsaicin can give me incredible delusions of grandeur.

I also thought about the braid of probability waves that I’m travelling upon, still waiting to collapse and decohere into its final state. The fluctuations are narrower, and the twists and turns, the bends and the weaves, are a lot trickier, a lot more subtle, and require greater and greater skill to navigate.

Navigate them I must. There is simply no other alternative.

Mostly, I’m at least half-crazed. I don’t know what it is, exactly. There is a sense of being suddenly cut loose. On one hand, I never even knew I was tethered. On the other hand, this immense freedom is greatly frightening. I have discussed how I like staying caught in my own traps, not because it makes me happy, but because it’s safe. If you know with a 100% certainty that you will fail, you will always know what to expect and you can never be disappointed. You will also be a spectacular failure, but I’d rather be right than actually live my life to the fullest.

No, that’s not true at all.

I keep saying that I don’t know what I want, and I think that’s true to a superficial degree: I don’t know how I want the details arranged. You know, like what color my destiny should be, how heavy my heart is, what kind of super powers I should cultivate. But in the big picture, I have these ideas. The issue is not so much the ideas, but the pathway leading up to these ideas. I feel like I can’t get there from here. There are no road signs to follow, only the tangled disorder of an ill-planned transportation infrastructure that seems deliberately built to get you irrevocably lost.

Now, quantum mechanics teaches us that, technically, anything is possible. For example, I could all of the sudden find myself asphyxiating in the vacuum of space in the next half-minute or so. There is actually a finite probability of something like this happening, although that probability is so infinitesimally small that it’s essentially indistinguishable from zero. In the same way, I know that there is a road that will lead me to where I can get to. Figuring out which of the vigintillion different paths ahead of me is the right one is not a trivial task, however. The odds of me finding the right path is similarly impossibly miniscule (although nowhere near the impossibility of random teleportation through spacetime, and probably less improbable than me winning the lottery jackpot on Wednesday.)

So where is it that I want to go?

Home, whatever that means. Again, this sense of stability, this sense of belonging. This sense of being tied to the flesh of your flesh, the blood of your blood.

And of course, Love. True Love, not that sappy shit they sell on Valentine’s Day. But the kind of stuff that keeps you sane and human even when it seems like civilization is collapsing. The stuff that keeps you going even when the odds are overwhelming. The kind of stuff that will make you lay down your life, because you feel that this kind of thing is worth fighting for.

True Love is ultimately a brutal and bloody thing. It is the stubborness of life in a universe that is inimical and antagonistic to life. It is the thing that keeps your soul together when every other part of you is cut, torn, shattered, broken. It is the blade of grass growing on a piece of hard, barren granite, striving to catch some sunlight. Love is the only thing that makes life worth living.

No, I lie. I do have concrete ideas of where I want to get to. I want to be able to show my dad my first-born daughter. I want to try and teach my kids how to live life, knowing that I will fail miserably, and still I will know that it would be worthwhile. I want to grow old and die surrounded by people who care about me in a profoundly deep way that can never be replicated. But I want them to not be too sad, and I want them to carry on with their lives, with me fading away into memory.

I’ve toyed with the idea of just forging ahead on my own, letting the bleak uncaring world simply swallow me up as I get lost in the utterly forsaken wilderness. Sure, somebody has got to do this task. Someone has to be John the Baptist, prophesizing and heralding the coming of something greater, with the only reward being getting your head cut off for no good reason.

Someone has to play the part of the sacrificial lamb.

I imagine that that someone is going to have to be me, and that my being will be obliterated by the uncaring years and decades, leaving no one behind who will ever remember my name, much less who I was.

Not that my meaningless destruction will have any impact on the world at large. I am not so narcissistic as to add a Messianic complex to my growing list of psychoses.

But, more concretely put, some people succeed in passing on their genetic information to the next generation, and some don’t, and from where I stand, the path of least resistance is in the “not” category.

Natural selection seems intent on throwing me out of the gene pool.

Call it human nature, call it what you will. It makes about as much sense as any other ridiculous rationale I can make up for being depressed. I want these things, but I don’t think I can get them, and so I’m simply screwed. Why should I not despair?

Oh yes. There is always a possibility. Quantum mechanics dictates that nothing can be completely hopeless.

But I’m tired of wishing upon stars. I suppose that I will have to gracefully degrade to Plan B, which is to simply procrastinate, and stave off death and oblivion as best as I can. If one imagines life as a book with an infinite number of pages, all I can do at this point is to keep turning them, and enjoy the ride until I get written out of the plot.

As they say, no one ever leaves this universe alive.

What am I trying to say? Who knows. When you’re drunk, everything seems to make sense, everything is magically interconnected. I will wake up tomorrow and look at this craziness and gape in awe and disgust, because this addled and neurotic clarity will have disappeared by then.