I have yet to determine when the ideal time to have my last cup of coffee is. I feel like if I don’t have it before 6 p.m., I’m totally going to fall asleep, but if I have it at 7 p.m., then I’m going to be awake all night.

I’m just not a morning person, I guess.

So here I am sitting at Influx, pondering all the time I spent here wrestling with my blog engine, just drinking in the sunlight and the caffeine. There was probably more caffeine than hemoglobin in my veins those days. (I can’t believe that was more than month ago!)

I sit here pondering things, and wonder about things that I’ve wondered about a million times before, knowing that there aren’t going to be any satisfactory answers. Not now. And probably not ever.

But what is it I want out of life?

Why are all the things I want, things that can’t really be attained, only because they’re moving targets.

It’s like trying to reach for the future, when by definition, the future is always going to be out of reach. It wouldn’t be the future if you could actually get there. It would just be the present.

Love. Happiness. Madness.

So where do I go next? There is no guiding principle behind my aspirations at this stage in the game. It would be an abuse of semantics to say that I’m content with how my life is these days, but I can’t think of a better way to describe this languid torpor that pervades each day, where I’m just happy with surviving the here-and-the-now, and screw the future, I’m never going to get there so why bother?

Hand to mouth. Paycheck to paycheck.

Sisyphus rolls the stone back up the hill yet again.

What I am is lonely. Even though I feel like there’s no way I’ve got time for companionship, I still crave it. I mean, what must that life be like, where I can come home from work to find someone waiting for me? Or to wait for someone to come home? Either way, I’m not picky.

But I’ve lived completely by myself for the past three years now. If anything, it’s made me more insular, more insane than I already was.

I can’t win.

The problem is that in the most obvious aspects, stillness has a lot in common with death. In the animal kingdom, if you’re not moving, you run the risk of becoming lunch. In terms of species, the rule of the day is “Change or die.” Fail to adapt to the environment, and risk extinction. Simple as that.

But clearly there is something different about being actively still, and being dead.

Hmmm. Active stillness. I like that. Very Zen or something.

If I could just stay within the already voluminous confines of my ruptured, warped brain, I think I would be OK. But I’m always probing, pushing, and poking at the limits. What I’ve got is never enough, even though it’s probably more than I need, more than I deserve.

I feel like the ideal human state is the state of near-completion. Of being in the process of completing one’s self, and yet still vibrantly incomplete. Always and eternally missing that final piece. (A picture book by Shel Silverstein suddenly comes to mind. Tyler Durden making declamations to his space monkeys also enters my mind. “I say, never let me be complete!”)

And yet, is this not some Zeno-like paradox of always failing to catch the tortoise? Halfway there, and then halfway again, ad infinitum? Can you be complete, truly still, and not be dead?

Bottom line: I’ve got a million and a half thoughts running through my mind, most of them bordering on if not outrightly invading insanity. One of these days, so God help me, I’m going to find myself on the wrong end of a 5150 psychiatric hold.