0064

So here I am again. After over a week, or almost one, I find myself once again at a keyboard, watching the cursor blink on vast, dark gray canvas. In. Out. In. Out again. And I wonder what to write.

Normally I don't like to wonder too much. I do all my wondering in advance, and save the fruits of that labour, those delicious words I dream up, to be unleashed right here. I'm good at it too, wondering. I, perhaps, do far too much wondering for a simple 24 year old boy. Sometimes, though, there's not enough time in the world for all the wondering I wish to do.

Unlike most posts, I haven't come here with any big thoughts prepared. Oh, I've had plenty to think about over the past week, far more than I have managed to capture. More than I could turn into memory and make legible. The issue with these wild muses is that they are beautiful in their wildness. A feeling must be captured as it arises. It can be captured, caged, saved for later like a frozen microwave dinner, and I suppose it often is, but it loses it's vitality in the process. It becomes lessened.

So, for all the wonderful muses that I've had the fortune to meet, I've captured and sanitized none of them. Sometimes a chaotic wildness is preferable to a meek and tamed muse. Perhaps there will still be some wildness in my words.

I've said this so many times it may as well be a catchphrase on here, but it's such a shame I get my best ideas when I am so busy. When I have the least time to write and capture the thoughts and let the rawness flow on the page. Still, no use complaining; perhaps life has not intended it's greatest secrets to be shared.

And what even have I been doing. I often conceptualize all my various games and hobbies and activities as a set of random functions. Maybe as random sine waves, that oscillate endlessly up and down and up and down but at unpredictable intervals. Normally, ideally, when one goes down and I get some free time then another one should go up to fill that void. When they all go up together, I enter a busy era where all idle musing becomes confined to my head. And when they all go down together, well I wonder where the excitement is and I find new activities, new random sine waves, to add to the pile.

So I have at least a dozen different things going on, or at least that could be going on. That may not be happening currently, but have the potential to suddenly and unexpectedly rise and require me to devote my attention. And they oscillate chaotically like the planets in the sky, appearing and disappearing over my horizon with no discernable pattern. Whose beauty must be appreciated before they dip back down, not knowing when they will rise again.

Except Gallileo did chart the courses of the celestial bodies in the heavens. Can my various hobbies be predictated with enough love and attention? Who will be my Gallileo?

I guess part of the problem is that half of what I do is highly dependant on others. I find it so much easier to take someone else's ideas and turn them into reality. Cozy even. Maybe it's some forlorn nostalgia to my glory days in grade school, where all I had to do was follow instructions to be rewarded with praise. Either way, I am more than happy to be on standby to turn other people's dreams into reality, even at the cost of a little bit of unpredictability.

You know, I sometimes envision myself as this strange, isolated vagabond who does not quite fit anywhere perfectly. Which is why it's always so strange to meet someone who's extremely similar to me. I have such a diversity of habits and hobbies that you'd think no sane mortal would choose to keep a schedule and interests such as I have, and yet recently I've discovered a friend who's more interested in them than I could have expected.

You're telling me that they like pottery, and philosophy, and sailing, and home automation, and climbing, and long articles? It seems almost too surprising to be true, but I suspect every large city bears more happy happenstance than it could ever divulge.

It's especially interesting that even for specific individual interests, like pottery, they're more interested than anyone else I know. It just so happens that the person who already really likes one of the things I do like all the rest? I guess maybe that's the way these things work out.

Maybe I'm not a disparate collection of random interests and activities, but there's some hidden thread that binds everything I do and everything I am. Something that is responsible for all the hard to understand decisions I often make. Perhaps if I could put a name to it, whatever it is, I'd come one step closer to uncovering the essence of whatever makes me me. Perhaps it's good to know this exists, that maybe there's other people possessed by the same mad energy that feels so eccentric. Maybe everyone has such a binding thread, somehow connecting what would otherwise seem like uncorrelated traits to the untrained eye.

I couldn't begin to put a name to what that could be though. Luckily, I don't have to. Even just knowing it exists is a strong first step to self mastery. And knowing that perhaps I can be less selective with my personality when I meet people is a huge boon.

I imagine this must be the benefit of living in a strong, omnipresent culture. Knowing that for the most part, everyone you meet is a lot like you. I don't know if I have a culture very much like that, but perhaps a name for such a culture simply doesn't exist yet.

If I could find a name, maybe I'd find more people who fit in it. And if doesn't have one, then naming it could be the first step to mastering it.