10:41-11:34 PM Saturday, March 11, 2006

i am still struggling with the idea of writing seriously. how do you make a living writing? not much of one; i can only imagine. especially this strange, sweet vision i have of some beat lifestyle... replete with travelling, sex, and drugs. inconceivable characters and experiencing life at its most bare - the wonderful, the harsh, and the cruel. as always, though, i worry with the notion that i am being selfish with my life. i see a classic car or read an article in a magazine about how now is the time to invest in a certain ferrari - ones at the bottom of their respective depreciation curves - and think: i could do that. someday, i will. someday i will have houses wherever i want to live, eat in fine restaurants, take up expensive hobbies. this all comes about by staying in school like i know i should, going through the exhausting process of pursuing further education, getting degrees of some sorts, and ultimately a job at some hospital putting people to sleep. is anesthesiology one of the noble areas of the medical profession? doesnt seem like one to me. seems like a necessary way to demand a lot of money... and an awfully easy way to kill someone. but i've been over all this and will not bore you any more with such an internal argument. i find it quite difficult to write fiction anyway.

certainly would be a crime, wouldnt it? if i were to put someone to sleep so deeply that they never woke up, how would that look in god's eyes? taking the life of another human being... is it intent that matters? the line in the sand between murder and a simple accident, mere stupidity. does god favor people over other forms of life? people are certainly the most "god-fearing" of the living things. so would it matter if i murdered an athiest, to god? i suppose it would. and what of an animal? the argument for or against a soul in humans is certainly pertinent, but if we can agree that there is, i cannot tell you there isn't a soul hidden behind the look in the eyes of my dog when i leave in the mornings. and if dogs have a soul, why not all living creatures? does it hurt the lord every time i took the life of an ant when i was younger? is every mosquito i bloody on my arm kept on some permanent record to be referenced when my time comes? a lot of questions for so few answers. i suppose devoting my life to the road and being of no use to humanity might render many of these killings null and void anyway.

rachel, my dear, you may not want to read the rest...

on the way home from a particularly interesting restaurant near jacksonville, tonight, i asked my mother, jokingly {because she is so good}, how long it would be until we got back to the motel. she predicted fifty minutes for an approximate arrival time of 10:26. pretty soon afterward, she gave a great whimper and swerved the car a little. i looked up in time to see a silver streak out the passenger's window from the backseat and catch another swerve - into the turning lane this time - accompanied by another great worried squeal. the cat had no idea what hit it. i have never understood what possesses an animal to pick the perfectly wrong moment to run a frantic gauntlet through traffic. i barely even caught a glance of the silver cat before its existance quite abruptly came to a conclusion with an unceremonious thump under one of our rear tires. i can only hope it was suffering from some mind-numbing disease and wasn't in a proper state of mind when it happened. i doubt it was thinking much at the time anyway.

my mother drove down the road a ways with one hand on the steering wheel and the other covering her mouth, slowly drifting into the other lane while uttering a few "oh my god's", until my dad calmed her down a bit. he got her back in the correct lane with his soothing talk, telling her there was nothing she could do. i offered to drive but was turned down. my sister, in the front seat, was even more severely shocked, i think, because she didn't say a thing. we exited onto I-95 and everyone was silent for a little wihle. while not a pleasant topic, i considered all the animals i could remember being hit in my presence.

there was this cat, of course, and a squirrel i hit on timber drive on the way in to school one morning, junior year. once on the way back from soccer practice, way back in the day, in some other mother's van, i saw a rabbit run into the road, missing the front wheels of a large truck in front of us, but deciding to act against his decision to run into the road with the equally regrettable decision to leave the street, hopping just in time to catch the right rear tire. a couple years ago on a scout kayaking trip in the mountains, i was in the back seat of my dad's truck when a deer ran down the side of the mountain to our left at break-neck speed and the presence of mind to aim directly at our truck. it hit the side of the truck with such velocity that we ended up with a four-foot dent and - after further review - a pregnant doe which had died of, go figure, a broken neck. perhaps the worst of these i won't discuss in detail, as it lies too close to my heart. know that it was bad, though.

hell, i don't even know what i'm doing anymore. does recounting my experiences with roadkill serve any purpose to humanity? i am not even doing myself any good. just about the only thing on my mind at this moment is a strong desire to be in bed with somebody. not even in a particularly sexual way, just a sincere need to hold somebody close to me. the warmth of another body. i would feel much less lonely in a dark room with somebody special than in this lit motel room with my family, my laptop, and animal planet.

remind me someday to change my moral values based on experience. i think i need to sleep around with people, experiment with all the drugs that don't promise permanent damage, hitchhike across america and europe. get drunk on tequila and wander the streets of mexico city. make music on a street corner and put out my guitar case just to see what people are willing to give. find a limited supply of creative energy buried down in the depths of my consciousness and write a novel that nobody will understand but me. remind me not to die until i begin, for once.

oh, and find somebody who wants to go on this journey with me.