Try not to take me too seriously here, for I might say something profound.

 

So, Steven’s got this video posted of Guy Clark singing Desperados Waiting for a Train. Hell of a song. I’ve gone through the links, watched a few more versions of it, with different singers. By the time I got to the Letterman video from ‘98 with the all star line up, I figured out what I believe to be one of the great mysteries of the human condition.

 We truly are all the fucking same.

 It doesn’t really matter what the great philosophers wrote or what the pundits spew or even what the ministers preach. Each of us goes through the same life and has to come to our own conclusions about everything that crosses our path. Read what you want and take it how you like it. You’ll have to, at some point, look at the world your way. The insights of Socrates, Leonardo and Jane Yolen are, at best, guides for those already on some path.

At this time in my personal grand scheme, I am frequently recalling some nugget I stumbled across weeks or years or lifetimes ago, and only now realizing their potency. Words that meant nothing to me then. Nothing. Because I lacked the necessary experience for it to sink in proper. Now, that I’m a bit more world wise, I can see that I’ve come to the same or to similar conclusions as these guys, I just don’t quite have the poetry to put the thoughts to the right words. And when I link some errant thought to those words,… I have to assume that this is what it feels like for a songwriter to get the flash of insight when the lyrics finally jive with the notes.

Now comes the cool part. More and more often, I’m finding that, when I come into contact with pearls of wisdom, I will have already both considered the subject matter at hand and decided my stance on it. I don’t see this as becoming smarter or more relavent in God’s Great Green, I see it as having covered more of the basic grounds of humanity.

 

I am very often reminded of the bit from Gaiman’s Sandman when Death has just taken an infant. The kid says “Is that all there is?” Death responds with, “You got all anyone gets: One lifetime.” I’m 26. Roughly a third or forth of the way through a standared lifetime, and I think I’m pretty well set for the rest of it. Or at least on the right path. In conversation, you can tell the people who take other people’s words and regurgitate them as their own, barely considering what they’re saying. The kind of Joe’s that quote politician’s because they belong to the same political party or quote Simon and Garfunkle without truly understanding the phrase, “I am a rock.” Fuck those people. If they never get it, so fucking be it. Because you can also tell the true thinkers. The ones that look at the world they’re living in and consider it in some way, great or small, metaphysically or in terms of quantum mechanics. Those are the one’s worth having a conversation with. I don’t know who said that famous phrase about surrounding yourself with people smarter than you, but wowser does it fit the great world wide. People are constantly saying that life is too short for this or that. Fuck that, too. Life is long and lots can be done within it. One doesn’t need a stated purpose or a cause to fight for, only to live their damn life.  I’m on the verge of doing something drasitc with mine. Not sure what, yet, but it’s on the horizon. 

Rick Blaine wasn’t the hero, Victor Lazlo was. Not everyone gets to be a champion.