So what's the deal?

I'm ignoring my friends, letting bridges burn, watching the hands encircle me. Excuses? Sure, but what good do they do if my behavior won't change? No, I've created this moment and take full ownership.

So what's next? Do I continue my descent into nuclear solitude? Sheer off all connection to those outside? I doubt that I'm capable of becoming the mechanism I'm so expected to be.

"But it's only temporary," I tell myself. Once a certain threshold is reached, I can distribute focus. I realize that if that was possible I'd have to spend energy to build anew. Established relationships of old have been neglected and those involved almost certainly feel scorn towards such detachment. I'd like to tell them that it wasn't due to coldness but rather discipline and priorities.

That discipline has not only squeezed out friendships and my social life, I've also lost something I've always been quite fond of. Until recently I cultivated a sort of mild omnipresent madness. It blured reality and enriched the present. Everything was a multitude of symbolism, weaving into and over each other and my consciousness danced over the combinations.

Frivilous! A man is meant to work. Every moment should be dedicated to reaching a potential.... What ever happened to those days when I sat on the porch with my coffee and cigarettes and watched the world buzz by? Time moved slower then. I didn't have such debts. I didn't hear the call of genetic determinism. I was able to accept the absoluteness of death.

Those moments have since been distilled to the smiles on my son's face, to ten minute conversations with my wife, to when I'm stuck in traffic coming home from work, turn off the radio and realize that the clouds are still passing me by like they did when I was eight. There are relative constants. But too often my attention drifts to the constant of sorrow.

That tendency is dangerous and risks derailing my plans. I'm all too capable of abandoning those activities that I know deep down as futile. The horrible thing is that I know everything falls into that category. A one-sixth-billionth fraction of a species of a dying planet has an ever decreasing value. But with the new addition that value has doubled.

So I invent reasons to keep excelling. The ideal man creates. We are not made in god's image but rather the other way around. There is something after all this... it's what we leave behind. The afterlife is nothing more than drifting echoes.