Tourists forever amaze me. let me take that back. when we are tourists, its funny. No, I take that back, because I would love to own that I sometimes am a tourist, you know, that whole belonging I'm one of us thing, but I'm totally misleading myself. The truth is I've never been like that. even when I was a forced-tourist as a child hanging with my parental units I was never into the tourist thing. I was always more interested in my thing rather than walking around staring at things and pretending that they were interesting because we were tourists.

People have time on their hands. They take vacations. They go places. They walk around a lot. they look at maps and they try to find the places on the maps so they can go there and see it and say they’ve been there. after they have looked at it they take pictures. They take lots of pictures. Then they go see something else. then they eat. then they buy stuff. then they go see more things. and then they say they are tired from all the sight-seeing and then they go back to their hotel and watch TV. I am always intrigued by people who get tired from their vacations.

people walking to the left, people walking to the right. lets go look at that. come here and look at this. hundreds of people walking here and there being tourists. People don't realize that other people just walked away from what they are now walking towards. Maybe they do and they don't care... They walk back and forth. To the right to the left. Here, there. let me get a picture. how insignificant it all is in the bigger view of it all.... much like ants in a little ant hill... random meanderings when viewed from a birds eye view. Someone builds a building and people stand in front of it and get their pictures taken in front of it, they take pictures of it, they stare at it and point at it. but its just a building. They do the same thing with boats and signs and animals and all sorts of things. I wonder what do they do with these pictures... look, there's a pointy building, there's a tower, there's a bridge. Here's a picture we took of the sunset, here's a picture we took of the dock. Here's a picture we took of some flowers.

Sometimes when I see tourists I get this knot in my stomach afraid that one day I will turn into someone like that. that one day my life will mean so little that I will become a tourist. That one day I will become a soft and mushy family man and not have anything better to do but go look at things that other people built or created. This is a deep fear. I pray it will never happen. but what if it does? Does that happen to everyone who has children? Lets take the kids to Disney world. I don't know if I should ever have kids because I don't think that I could ever find a desire to do that. I would rather send the maid or the nanny to do it with them... tell me about it over dinner when you get back honey...

I feel the same way about TV. I cannot imagine sitting in front of a TV talking about what we are watching as if it is important or relevant. But I fear that It may happen anyway. maybe it happens to everyone. Can you imagine? Is this all of our fates? To grow old and soft and silly and lose our edge? To not have a grand scheme or mission or noble goal? To have a favorite show instead?  look Martha, its your favorite show... let me turn it up... where's that darn clicker?