1.06.2008

starshine, never gonna find me

it is a brand new year, the 2008th Christian year, and the million-somethingth for the rest.
can you feel it in the air, in that bitter frost (or oddly warm breeze, the wheezing of a dieing planet)?

I can't either. Just like a birthday the time passes just the same and I am left with the same
feelings I had yesterday. New Year's reminds me of a Steven Wright joke, something along these lines: I came home one morning to find that someone had broken into my apartment, stolen everything I owned, and replaced each with an exact replica."

But New Year's does mean change, even if it is an arbitrary date on a superimposed industrial calendar (I could be more circadian/pagan and save my resolutions for an equinox). I've made a few resolutions, two maybe three, but I'm procrastinating. I don't see the point in holding myself to some champagne-hungover, drearily cold and grey morning to violently amend some vice of mine. If I'm gonna start a new habit or kick an old one, I'll do it when I feel like it is a momentous and fresh day, a day I can wake up, shower, go outside, smell the air, give that Coca-Cola 'ahhh' and say "Goddamn I feel like shaking things up."

That did not happen to me yet. If anything, the holiday reminded me of all the shit I want to change, a nice little inventory of idiosyncracies that could use some tweaking. It also reminded me of a maxim that I like to keep close to my awareness at all times, one of those enlivening
and trippy sayings that can go as deep as you want it to: "The history of the entire universe has led up to this very moment."

As pressing as your concerns may be, as massive as your problems may seem, take a look at them from outer space. Become self-conscious from the point of view of the stars: con-sider yourself in the scope of all things. It is that "disinterested" P.O.V. that I am looking to cultivate, for I feel it is crucial for the power to amputate the unwanted and mend your life. It is not the outlook of a character in the novel of personality, not the protagonist's nor narrator's, but the author's.