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Monday, October 16, 2000

The End is Here, Always

I'm thinking in incomplete sentences lately. Not enough sleep, or at least feeling that way. Not enough exercise perhaps; too many meetings, too much sitting, too many airline flights. Writing from 30K MSL again, the unpopulated bumpy desert of mid-California below me. Haze, daze. Fueled by a rushed brunch of shrimp and pot-stickers, sipping on a bottle of water, writing half-brained replies to emails deserving more.

I just finished a teleconference with Megacorp patent lawyers. They're busily patenting every obvious thing I've done in the last year. I arrived at the airport a little early so I could attend this 1.5 hour "meeting" from the terminal between checking in and boarding--call it killing two snails with one stone. The gate wasn't open yet, but they have new boarding-pass vending machines which are much friendlier than the Unitons anyway.

Michelle dropped me off at the airport, asked me why I postponed my return to Maui and came down to San Diego for the weekend. I didn't have an answer for her. I don't have one for me.

I've fallen into an existential slide, passing time without purpose or goals, doing time in a prison of my own devising, guilty of being good, a crime against both the easy and the great.

My long-term memory is so poor I don't recognize my own patterns repeating from the past, but my conceptual memory is sufficient that I feel their presence with the dread of a wandering soul who stumbles unexpectantly upon his own footprints. Any sign of repetition plays forward and backward in my mind to cover the full span of my life, and I laugh at those delusions of progress that strike me in my shallower moments. How to rectify the incongruousness of exerting such efforts on behalf of a disposable future?

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