This is what I do, as you all know, but here’s how I do it, in case you have no idea. It’s important to spell out the different aspects of a hobby or obsession, or whatever you want to call it, and this is me attempting to do just that.
Sitting in a Starbucks while I write and greedily gulp down this expensive, super-flavorful coffee is what most people might consider a leisurely pursuit, but to me, it’s an extension of life. The ability to let the dark thoughts out in such a way that others can see them is risky business, but it is business nonetheless. Opening my mind and my heart and the deep, dark depths of my soul, I’m trying to let other people inside me in such a way that comes unnaturally to me in person. It makes sense if you know me, and if you’ve been paying attention, you get to come very close.
Sitting here, I write. Typing on this expensive keyboard attached to this expensive iPad because I didn’t want to buy a laptop because a laptop is too versatile yet oh so limiting. Trying to make a name for myself in a place where names don’t matter all that much. Trying to be genuine to myself while I work in a place filled with personalities without souls and appearances without faces.Living is about finding your place. Writing is about finding your voice. Working is about making your life livable, yet it reaches a point where you have to continuously ask yourself if what you’re doing is worth it. What I’m doing is worth it, of course, but in the largest scheme, it doesn’t matter. Delivering food to people who could easily get it for themselves. Writing words for people who could less-easily write their own. This is my gift to you. Madness encapsulated. Ideas expounded. Purportedly deranged in such a way that it makes sense. When it can.
No one really knows what it’s all about. “What if the Hokey-Pokey…” is just another way of asking a ridiculous question and coming up with an equally ridiculous, nonsensical answer, but it’s just as good as any other answer to this question that doesn’t matter. No one CAN know what it’s all about. No one can really know what IT really is, anyway. “It,” is an ubiquitous idea. A pronoun that simple exists to delimit the undefinable. And that’s what this is about. Nothing.
Nothing can be said to encompass nothing else, and that’s fine. It doesn’t make sense in the ways we make sense of things because we have to have something to make sense of and something to compare it to. The infinite void is empty, and that emptiness belies explanation. Once it’s measures or observed, it’s no longer “nothing,” and that’s an idea that the human brain can’t wrap around. I certainly understand it, but my understanding, or lack thereof, is secondary to the bigger point.
The bigger point? It’s very simply. There is no point. I’ll put it in quotations marks so it seems more profound. “There is no point.” Life goes, and no one knows where it really came from. Life ends, and no one really knows why. Where does it come from, and where does it go? No one can know the answer, and that frightens a lot of people. Of course, there are those like me who embrace the darkness and uncertainly of ignorance, and we try to make sense of it, but we’re simply whistling in the dark just like everyone else.
There is no point. And there was no point. I broke out this expensive toy to piddle into the wind with trite clichés that we use to describe things that should remain indescribable, and I wait. And I write. And I watch and wonder. And I waste time just as we all waste time wondering and pondering, and it doesn’t matter. There is no point except for that which we imagine. There is no grand scheme, and there is no big plan. And that is, unfortunately, is what it’s all about.