Hope keeps me going. When I wake up I hope today is better than yesterday, most of the time it isn't.

These two little ones are my grandchildren. My heart now walks around outside my body. My purpose in life is to do what I can to make sure they grow up safe and secure. My secondary purpose is to keep my job so I can continue life as it is; pay the bills and health insurance. My final purpose is to create, and get through my stacks of projects before I die. Which means I can't die for about 99 more years. I don't think my retirement savings are going to last that long.

With these thorny existential questions, I usually resort to Jane Austen.

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”

― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Music, marijuana, life’s assured brevity in the grand scheme of things, the fact that it is promised to no one, and that it can’t possibly get much worse than it’s already been. Morbid curiousity perhaps, but I’m ready for something good to finally happen and I’ve got no choice but to bank on the fact that it can and will if I keep looking. Even if all I have is 30-40 more years of loneliness it’d be a shame to waste them. Time to breathe and exist of my own volition is its own reward. Sometimes the door prize and the grand prize are the same thing; it’s the journey not the destination n all that jazz.

Unless you’ve entered a very specific competition, there’s really not much of a definitive end point, conclusion or reward to anything beyond the thing itself. Enjoy every sandwich, dance, and celebrate the process of every human connection you make or creative thing you manage to add to. Take pride in developing useful or entertaining skills and kill it for the sake of killin it. I’ll sing to the spiders in my stairwell like I’m auditioning for The Voice. Fuck the purpose. You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig? Doesn’t get much better than those moments of pure presence in any process. If there’s any purpose it’s simply to grow together and share those moments while we still can.