My Roman Holiday

Why should I live?

Audrey Hepburn said in the movie "Roman Holiday", "If I were not completely aware of my
duty I should not have returned tonight. Nor indeed ever."

I don't know if it's my sense of duty or just a bad habit, or mere laziness...but I have returned again tonight.

I used to think about this a lot. I finally got around to asking myself what matters, as the measure of whether or not struggling to continue living made sense. Things matter...items, things you can sit on, or wear or eat. You can make a difference in the world by making things. Long ago, and every now and then for a week or a month I get moved by this motivation. But it doesn't last. My struggle with the SpaceWar program will be a very public demonstration of that. I got to the point that ideas matter more. Ideas can outlast things. Very few things have outlasted really good ideas. You can name most of them, and mostly they're useless, were useless from the beginning, and always will be...like a pyramid.

There's an idea in my fiction. It's not a big one and I am sure its nothing like unique to me. The idea that Bible stories, as presented, almost always talk over the heads of kids. (and adults are so stupidized by this century of public education that they are just as needy of this...)That I my stories aim low to include them. It might last, but I am struggling so much with discouragement I will likely not even bother illustrating them or try to get the submitted for publication.

What will I affect?

Almost nothing. I have changed nothing except a handful of lives, to some modest degree. Mostly that wont count for anything in the world. And the fondest memories of the most loved in our lives may be a cherished thing, from time to time, for a moment here or there, but that's of almost no consequence in a person's life.

lol I have re-invented existential angst.

Here's my advice. Don't talk to me or read my words. There's nothing in any of them except that one thing in my fiction that...as far as I can tell one person actually cared to read. Everybody else had to be asked to read my stuff. That person just likes me mainly because that person is really sweet, and forged a bond with me in dire/exceptional circumstances...and so far away is not enough of a motive to face this life for.

Maybe there's more to live for when your snug in the web of a family you love, or maybe its just more distracting. But I always have and always will live in my head, and as such will never integrate, never have integrated, like other people do. I see it in small things. Its not easy to see, but if you look closely for a decade or so, you can see the differences.

As much as we all are, I suppose, I was made to give love and with a hunger to be loved. Its just not going to happen. Not in this lifetime. There's not enough left, the changes would be to great to make in 10 or 20 years.

I'll likely continue talking and writing. Distracting myself as much as I can, while I can.

Sock away a bottle of strong alcohol if you can drink because there'll be a good blizzard or some snowy mountains you can drive to before it gets too bad, or start storing up a cache of pills if, like me, you can't drink.

This was my "roman holiday."

Sorry, but it's good to vent, even to a stupid blog nobody looks at.