A lot of stories pit love against duty, making them completely antithetical to each other, because we live in a culture that says you should never do something you don’t want to. But, just from observation, sometimes love truly arises from duty, and a sense of duty can be kindled by love, and eventually you can’t tell which comes first, and which arises from the other.

I am trying not fixate on the fact that I totally pissed away my day off being angry, since that only makes me even more angry.

You ever been so pissed off that it exhausted you? Yeah. Just woke up from a rage-induced four hour nap. Still feeling kind of ragey. No, I don’t want to talk about it. Yes, I’d like to punch something.

This was always an article of faith for me: it might as well have never have happened if there isn’t a story to tell. As I’ve spent several years of my life essentially alone, this has caused me to feel a significant portion of my life is unreal and perhaps even in vain.

But this was when leaving a mark on the world was more important to me. It seems vainglorious now that the likelihood of me accomplishing some extraordinary feat (or perhaps some perfectly mundane but meaningful feat) recedes with every passing day. I still want to try to make a difference, but I’ve come to accept the possibility that I won’t. Well, like Gandhi said, whatever you do is insignificant, but it is important you do it.

Still, on these strange nights when I lie awake staring into the darkness, and my thoughts lead to memories of lost opportunities and chances I thought I had but probably never really did, I worry that there won’t be anyone to tell these little stupid stories about my life to, except the uncaring silence. So I guess trying to blog is at least an attempt–perhaps futile–to stave off my journey into annihilation by at least a little while. My small bulwark against oblivion. When all is said and done–and though I hope the end won’t be for a while yet–the only thing that ever has a chance at staying real are the words, the stories.

I didn’t want to threadjack, but it’s crazy how a song will just take me back into the recesses of my memory (although the version that I have in my head is the inferior remake by INOJ*.) It reminds me of the summer I went on an East Coast trip with my parents and siblings, from NYC to northern Virginia. It was definitely a time when the world was still rife with possibility, and I still remember hoping for something dear that never came to fruition.

It’s kind of sad that one of the happiest times in my life was also when I was most deluded about my prospects for the future. Ah, well. At least now I’m older and wiser (and sadder, too, but everything has a price.)

*Or maybe it was Dana Harris. My memory ain’t as sharp as it used to be.

So when I was a teenager and in my twenties, I used to be really into “Best of” lists and countdowns and reflecting on the last 365 days and all that crap, but lately, I just don’t give a crap.

Now, I’ve always been a big believer in looking back. One of my favorite aphorisms is from Jose Rizal (one of the national heroes of the Philippines) which basically translates into “He who does not know how to look back will never get to where they’re going.” Self-reflection is critical for human development, and it’s difficult to learn new things without this ability.

But I think I’ve come to the realization that (1) one year is not a whole hell of a lot of time and (2) you don’t need to do it just because the calendar says you should.

So lately, I often think of Orpheus trying to lead Eurydice back from the bowels of Hades, or of Lot’s ill-fated wife. Of Daenerys Targaryen from A Song of Ice and Fire and her mantra of “If I look back, I am lost.”

And a thought comes unbidden from my head, something I imagine Coyote or Loki would say. “It’s wise to look back once in a while. But you do not need to do it while your pursuers are on your heels.”

Maybe one day I’ll look back at all this (ALL OF THIS) and laugh. Or at least shrug.

So I’m sitting here procrastinating over the millions of things I’m supposed to get done. Apparently I’m hosting my sister’s birthday and my parents’ anniversary party at my house on Tuesday, and the inside of my house still looks tore up, almost like I had left all the windows and doors open that day the winds blasted up to 80 mph. Basically boxes and papers all over the place. This is a direct consequence of the fact that I’m a single guy living in a three bedroom house, and I simply don’t know how to sanely manage all this space.

I’m pretty much paralyzed by indecision here.

I’ve also been listening to Christmas songs all day, and there are a few that always get me nostalgic, or even teary-eyed, and one of the more poignant ones is “My Grown Up Christmas List” because it always reminds me of the first post-September 11th Christmas season (which I did blog about once upon a time, a long, long time ago) and how I sat in a nearly deserted Target parking lot in the desolate northern hinterlands of Chicagoland, feeling utterly lonely, and trying to keep tears at bay.

Good times. Or something.

But, yeah, we need little kids in this family or something. The holiday season tends to be this terrible slog because of this godawful SAD. The lightbox does help, though. Whenever I remember to use it, I don’t feel like the weight of the world is on my back, and I don’t feel like I need to sleep for 12 hours on end. It doesn’t actually fix my life, though, so there’s still that to contend with.

But it is what it is. While my heart may now be a permanently desiccated ruin, I suppose I’m where I’m supposed to be. Fate. You can’t beat it. At all.

It would be easy, just like falling asleep. But I never did like easy. I must endure.

It is easy to feel rejected because of the fact that people weren’t able to modify their schedules to accomodate me trying to drive up about 400 miles in order to see people I haven’t seen literally in years, but, yeah, some people have farther to travel that day, and what’s another few years more, I guess. People grow apart. It happens.

I’m feeling disconnected and unreal.

So I’m driving home and all of the sudden my iPod starts playing “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, and the lyrics just hit me:

Loneliness like a heartbeat, drives you mad, in the stillness of remembering what you had, and what you lost.

And as I move stuff out of my parents’ house, I’m sifting through scattered fragments of the last twenty years of my life, and I’m thinking of all the missed chances (and how many of those chances are just in my head?) and I’m trying to come to grips with the fact that this is my life now, and this is probably it until the end. There’s no point in hoping for more. Random chance is all I’ve got.

I’ve been wanting to write an actual blog post and not just Twitter-like sentence fragments, but I just haven’t been able to gather my thoughts. As much as I think sleep is absolutely necessary, it sure would be great to have an extra eight hours a day.

I just need a moment.

Trying to focus more on what I have, instead of what I don’t.

Funny how the random function of my iPod can just make my thoughts go “that a way”, to steal a turn of phrase. ”I See the Light” from the “Tangled” soundtrack started playing, and I started thinking about fairy tales. There has been much ink spilled and many photons shed about how Disney ruins little girls, but maybe it’s not really that gender-specific. While it might be argued that Hollywood in general peddles the pernicious idea of “happily ever after”, none of the studios inculcates this idea so universally to people at such a young age.

But if you look at non-Disneyfied fairy tales, very few of them really end “happily ever after”. True, in most of them, the protagonist “wins”, but more often than not, that victory is won by great pain and terrible sacrifice and sometimes overwhelming loss. Fairies and elves always exact some kind of price, which most humans cannot fathom until it’s too late.

I don’t remember exactly when I came to the sober realization that “happily ever after” was never going to happen. Part of it is surely just the inevitable disillusionment of growing into adulthood. Others might point to the disastrous ending of the only serious long-term relationship I’ve ever been involved in. But I think it was when I got stuck in a recurrent pattern of unrequitedness, especially the few rare times I’ve shared how I thought I felt, and was met only with incredulity and silence.

I started thinking about other forms of “happily ever after”. For the longest time, I pondered a “good death”, dying in some glorious battle, like heroes and knights in epic sagas and chivalric romances. But after more time passed, even that seems extremely unlikely. Having seen actual death too many times, it’s hard to imagine it can ever be glorious. To quote another song entirely, “The best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.”

But that Alan Menken-penned Disney song always gets me, because I remember the times in my life I’ve experienced that clarity, however briefly, and I can’t help but accept that it’s never going to happen again. The last person I’ve ever felt that way about has long ago married, and I try not to wonder too often if she even gives me a thought from time to time.

Sometimes I wallow In the grimness of the times we live in, and I can’t help but feel that all I can really hope for is inevitable loss upon loss, and then endless loneliness until the darkness comes. But the more rational part of me knows that it’s not as terrible as that. “There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends.”