neurological dryer lint

our flight got in at 3:15 or so and so i ended up back home at about 4:30. i'm pretty out of it, we kept busy enough, and walked a whole lot more than any human should around the monuments yesterday. good times, not too much else interesting to say about it. pictures will be up as soon as i get the rest of them off my phone. for being such a large, recognized, successful cell phone company, nokia sure does make it ridiculously hard to grab a group of images off your phone at once instead of sending each image one at a time using bluetooth.

i wanted to write about something else. you feel the fringes of something like this in your brain every day of your life - i know i've written about it somewhere before - and i saw it again this evening, like a shadow in the corner of my eye, while i was watching some six feet under. there's a great scene in the episode i watched where claire, the art student, is looking at a magnificent piece of sculpture with her friend and they're talking about what it means to be successful as an artist. if it means you sell a lot or if you're well recognized... or if it's just that you realize you've done well and you're happy with what you've created.

she points at this piece she's amazed by, and says "i feel like such a phony... because i can't imagine ever being this dedicated or this consumed by anything... i would never cut off my f*&%@ing ear. never."

when i realize that i am passionate about nothing except my own comfort and entertainment.. it used to panic me. i'd get this rush of adrenaline, like i was late for a final or something. it was never enough to move me off of the couch, but it was enough to get my brain worked up. i would sit and stew and dream up wacky ideas for what i could do with my time to make an impact on the world, leave a mark.

this, my life as it is, isn't how things are supposed to be. our lives should matter more. i will work every day in an office and buy a hosue in the suburbs and grow old and die like the vast majority of the populace i've grown up in... i'm desperately afraid of that.

why do i want to leave a mark? be remembered? it's a vanity thing. i'm self-obsessed. i'm the most important person in the world to myself, and i want people to think i'm as important as i think i am.

so that line about how our lives should matter more isn't a noble cause, spawned from a desire to see things better for everyone and for world peace and all that crap. it's simply about me wanting people to think i'm noble and generous and insightful and important. as long as people think those things (or i think that they think them) i could sit on my couch every day for the rest of my life.

besides my own comfort, i'm passionate about nothing. i leap at the desire to be passionate about small things - i get angry about wars and government and copyright law, i get excited about music and movies and games, i donate to organizations and causes - i do these things because i'm desperate to have something consume my attention. but none of it is worthwhile.

the thought that i'm not passionate about anything except myself didn't panic me tonight. it seems to me that the one thing in the human spectrum that is worth directing the energy of an entire life is being with God. which makes sense from a certain point of view and also sounds silly from a certain point of view. i happen to see from the former. problem is it's plain as day to me, completely obvious and rational and sensible and yet i can't feel as vibrant about it as i did once.

and yet it's more real and concrete to me than it ever has been. me and God. there's a thing there, that i take for granted now, that once was novelty and is now as familiar as wearing glasses. i can't imagine what it would be like to not have that.

does reliability, familiarity, breed mediocrity? does it have to exist at the expense of passion? what i know of God would deny that idea - the opposite would be true - a close intimacy with God would, while feeling familiar, inevitably drive an individual's life, their every step.

that's the difference. me and God, it's familiarity, it's a relationship without fire. i have created the chasm, too. the only worthwhile target of human passion, right there next to me, and i treat him like an extra in the story of my life. or the key grip. go figure.

so i'm not hopeless about it. i'm very aware of it, though.

listening to: rage against the machine - war within a breath