Still finding myself obsessed with a quiet secret subtle and almost constant gnawing at my insides about the unbearable sadness of how impermanent everything is. It creeps up on me throughout the day and I have to fight back the feeling of hopelessness when I start to think about how temporary everything in our lives is. Our lifetimes are short here. Our day to day experiences are memories before we even have the chance of taking each of them in. one minute we are having a good time and in the next moment it is a new day and we barely remember the events of the day before. It is a horrible and haunting understanding that sits in the back of my mind at all times.

I remind myself that it is up to me to find meaning while I am here. I try to live my life to its fullest and even then I cannot shake the deep underlying knowing that they are all just moments lived and then soon forgotten. Where is the meaning in that? Where is there meaning in anything if it is all just going to become a memory, never to exist again? Or worse even, soon not even a memory, because we tend to forget things so easily. I cannot shake the horror of it. why live at all? that's what always comes up for me. Why are we living in the first place if each day is just going to drift on into the non-existent past?

There is absolutely no way to retrieve the past. Each day of our lives is lost to the next, and if that weren't horrible enough, that day is also lost to the one that follows it. we are just floating inside of this thing called life. just riding in it like passengers in a stranger’s car; with very little control and even less control of how we process it or how much of it we are able to remember.

Now this does remind me of a few things. Beav’s wife and sister Lollie, two of the most mainstream good old American girls you'd ever want to meet have been scrapbooking all their lives. So they can pull out a book from just about any time in their lives and show you pictures of their former selves and their friends and family members. This is a nice attempt at salvaging our ever fleeting lives and memories. But a futile exercise. If there is ever a fire in their home or a flood or a war or any other disaster their scrapbooks will be destroyed in a heartbeat.

And worse even, in time the scrapbooks will be close to meaningless anyway. As they pass on and their children get older and then their children become older these scrapbooks will become less and less useful or important or meaningful. eventually they will be forgotten or tossed into a box or thrown away. and their lives, the lives of my two beautiful sisters in law will be entirely forgotten, like myself and my brother Beav and my mom and everyone else I know now. that's just life. and it suffers me greatly.

I have found myself less and less interested in day to day conversations because I have come to understand how utterly pointless they are. In less than a few hours they will be forgotten. When the family gathers around the table to bs and have fun and hang out and talk and all that, I find myself obsessing on how futile and pointless it is to be there talking shit and hanging out. after all, in a few years someone will get divorced and we won't be hanging out anymore, or someone else will die or even if that doesn’t happen, eventually we all will be dead and won't even be a memory to anyone at all. so instead I sit and stare at everyone laughing and listen to their ultimately meaningless diatribes and wonder why we all even bother to talk to each other at all.

I remember rummaging through some boxes at the goodwill and finding these boxes of all these families belongings. Baby clothes and framed pictures of people and photo albums and trinkets. And I felt so devastated by the experience. I sat there staring at the photo albums wondering who these people were and how all of their personal belongings ended up at a goodwill store. Were they all dead now? was there a divorce and one of the parents gave away all their stuff? were the people in the framed pictures still alive? Did they know that their stuff was being rummaged through by strangers everyday and was for sale? Where are these poor souls now who framed these meaningless photographs?