2011-03-20, 6:01 p.m.

searching for step two

I don't feel good. And I don't care if that's improper grammar, because "I don't feel well" is too proper, too old fashioned, and the way I'm feeling is new and ugly and plastic, post-modern, empty, and aching.

I woke up this morning and decided to be selfish, just for the day, to only do exactly what I wanted, responsibility be damned. So I lay in bed, looking at the window, at the cold grey light slicing through the shutters, and I asked myself what I wanted to do. And as I lay in bed, looking at the window, I realized I couldn't think of a thing.

You know, maybe I've gotten this all wrong. I take these threads of memories and try to trace them back to the source, through the years and years of mistakes and triumphs to those very small points of departure, of existence. I ask myself, how have I been composed? How has the music been written, influenced, altered? And why am I incapable of dancing to it?

And I know life is full of questions that will never be answered, and I'm okay with that, I think, sometimes, but that gets me wondering about all of life and people and animals and futility and then I really, really don't want to do anything. Exist, even.

But I've been down that path and it's not cute anymore (it never really was) to be an adult and sad, everyone tells you to keep your chin up, to deal with it, wait it out. We are taken from the safe place our parents built for us, kidnapped as children from Never Never Land and brought into the razor-sharp light of reality, and we are told, "exist." And we want specifics, we want direction, but they leave us alone on some desolate street corner next to an empty parking lot and just drive away, so we'll never get answers, not ever again.