Hourglass

Should I just blitz the readership with my views on contemporary issues? Or should I butter them up a bit by namedropping a few bands, expressing opinions on them (mostly having to do with their status as sellouts or the antithesis thereof), and then launching into the politics? I could do an impromptu sweet-talking; I 've had to culitvate the habit of that, and I am somewhat out of practice. The three richest bureaucrats in Washington would appreciate such lengthy but duplicitous bullshit. For that matter, can I discuss that philosopher who wrote the book ("On Bullshit"), or have I done that already? I must admit: the will to blitz has been somewhat lacking lately. Maybe it's anemia (or anaemia--whatever); maybe it's my new squinty-eyed shuffle, alternately avoiding human eyes and seeking them out too quickly; maybe ever since I stopped eating meat the carnivorous part of me is slowly sinking away, unpeeling and reverting to my plesiomorphic Will to Nothing. (Interestingly, my view of religion has become more mixed of late, owing to my experiences with the Christan Left. Here are people whose values I share more thoroughly, who I have more in common with than the individualist, libertarian American asshole militant atheist.) But I can't rest on my laurels, because I have none. I have some second-place trophies and "Good Job!" ribbons somewhere, and that will not do. I need to recover my six-hour exegeses over sake or over the soft glow of cigarette tips. There are love songs and dancings songs whose anthemic chord pregressions have not been written yet, though they are few. There are still cantinas to peruse and blocks to wander down, and there will never be a shortage of faces and skulls to work my neo-phrenological magic on. There are still religions to found and pandemics to recreate, and I still have not looked God in the eye and dissolved Her pillar of salt.

Consider: "And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not."