Life makes no sense.

Today I stood around mostly chatting with my coworkers on this slow day. Somewhere else in Tucson guy was working in a refinery and at a hospital a nurse was tending to the dying. In Iraq a Marine was killing someone and an Iraqi was trying to kill that Marine. In Thailand a poor man was fishing while his family tended to the home. In Siberia a miner was miserable, in London an IT worker took the train home, in Brazil a topless woman sunned herself on the beach…

Somehow this all is human life and the notion that at every moment in time it is the same and completely different amazes me.

This morning, I see the wonder and depth and the simultaneous utter futility of my life while flossing my teeth. And I know that doing something more prestigious than feeding the thoughtless and the uncaring would only pay better and would still leave me amazed in the morning that I was flossing my teeth while all the rest of the world continued along its merry way.

[note: Paid better is a good thing because I used to have money and I remember never having to think about buying the consequences of buying something on impulse like when I bought a spectacularly wonderful suit on Wednesday as a kind of birthday present to me and a first step in changing my current "uninspired" mode of living. The advice I can offer to kids is to never be a generalist. Curse the foul thoughts that make everything interesting!]

The notion that life makes no sense makes no sense either. I talk to the cute med student who responds and we both question ourselves about whether it’s worth the trouble of fucking each other, whether this is the “one”, and chemistry flutters about us. Literal chemistry not that silly romantic notion. It’s pheromones and hormones and plain old moans that make love happen. I spend a little time around the ex-love and feel that missing element, that vast chasm between us, and I wonder if it was just some pheromones and a timeliness that made the difference.

And yet humans all need to create the story of the love. It’s the story that matters more than anything.

Its the story of everything that matters and not the reality of it perhaps. Consider who you are and what you do with you days. What is the narrative you tell yourself that makes all those insanely pointless activities meaningful? Are you building a career, raising a family, are you struggling to change the world, to keep out the demons, are you trying and failing and failing and trying? Are you a baker, a hiker, a computer tech, a statistician, a clerk, a manager, an carpet installer, a lover, a friend, a writer, a film maker, a prophet, or a comic?

It’s the narrative that informs our lives, tells us who is god, and who is satan. It is the story we create for ourselves that makes the world meaningful to us and maybe, if we’re a connector of others or a salesman of ideas, maybe then our story makes other stories richer and directed.

We are our brands. The brands we use are us. We are the Gore-Tex clothing we use in hiking. We are the pants we wear to the meeting. We are the idea of those pants. We are the music we choose and the friends we choose who choose music too. We are the group we belong to that uses stuff to define the group which becomes part of the story that defines the group.

Am I now the expensive suit as opposed to the the beaten up traveler’s clothing? If I become the suit so completely will I suddenly find myself confident, successful, a wheeler and a dealer or will it not matter at all and will I always be the downtrodden wander of life looking for love and wisdom in all the wrong places?

This is old and trite and not insightful in any way. I’m amazed by ideas people have had for generations and still have because each time you feel that understanding of the story and the creation of a life you can only respond with “wow…that is absolutely crazy.”

In a movie a look, a movement, a reflex is the story. The light in that moment is the storey. In life it’s even more so because the words, the movements, the looks, the moments have consequences. The story moves along. The narrative structure becomes more complex. The ways and means of life explode. That touch at the right moment tipped a response. The flickering light made the moment. The world changed and the story continued.

And I woke up in the morning and flossed my teeth and I thought about that and what it meant.