Soon I'll have internet again, in the new year, in my new house. It will be a year of internet, unlike the last year, which was a year of no internet. It was peaceful, and I read a lot, and sometimes I was bored and didn't have the internet to fiddle around on, but (this is importantly different than years previous) I was never bored at the computer. Except that time I started playing that game that was like jezzball and it turned out that at some point God allotted me jezzball skills such that it will just keep going and I got to level 25, meaning there were 26 balls bouncing around the screen which my poor old computer couldn't handle and it just gave up, which was just as well, since I was getting, as I began this sentence saying, bored.

I don't have a lot of direction in my life. Sometimes I think that is a good thing, mostly I think it's a bad one. Direction is no doubt important to future happiness. Am I spitting in the face of future Alex? Am I obligated, me present Alex, to insure future Alex's happiness, by virtue of our body-sharing (in a sense; I mean, if you grind down future Alex (that is, like, 40 year old Alex is really who I'm thinking of) and you grind down me you won't find a single atom in common. but then neither will you between a wave here and the same wave here; form is what's important, even if his form will be somewhat degraded)? And how can I insure future Alex's happiness? How can I know his tastes? What if I were to spend my time stockpiling cherry cokes, only to lose my taste for them in a freak cherry coke accident? That would be bad.

I don't have anything to write, I just want to write. I don't write enough. I enjoy writing, especially like this, in a stream-of-consciousness self-indulgent way. Then later I read it and am embarassed (sic), but then try not to be, which only makes it worse. Poor future Alex. When I was a kid I had this theory, that there were millions of different Alexs, we switch off every second or millisecond or nanosecond or whatever smallest amount of time I then knew; it's hard to notice the switch but a sufficiently attuned six-year-old can do it. I don't think I have ever internally renounced this theory, and it really makes a lot more sense to me than the single-Alex hypothesis. It was also useful on long car trips, such as when we drove from Illinois to California to fly to Hawaii - my sister was whining, as she is apt to do to this very day, and I counseled her that in a certain sense this was already over, and that it didn't really exist except in our memories, and we wouldn't even really remember much of it, so it doesn't really exist, so you needn't worry about being bored (since you don't exist). This did not offer her much solace. It also is ironically the only part of that trip I remember, except later when we went to Disneyland.

Paragraphs should, I realise, indicate some grouping of thought, but these ones just indicate that I have reached an embarassing number of consecutive sentences and if I don't skip a line people's eyes will glaze right over, as they do. My family's watching the President's Analyst, which is a funny movie about spies. I have been unable to squelch a sort of low-burning anti-Christmas in my gut this year, I don't know why. I think it's the expectation of merriment and my naturally contrarian self. If I voice this my family will assume it's cynicism and anti-consumerism. We never escape who we were when we were 18. Many of my shirts still have no tag, because I cut them all out, because I didn't want to wear a logo in any way. It is very difficult to put my shirts on right, but capitalism still stands. Now I force myself to wear logos, and even wore an Enjoy Coca~Cola shirt while working at the anarchist bookstore, which may have been much and I think I was internally hoping to get a leftist reprimand but nobody said anything. Anarchists are surprisingly reasonable, nice people, though I always want them to be the raving dogmatic anti-everything they're supposed to be, because it would make my conscience about not really being much of one a bit better.

We are all the product of ten thousand histories colliding, and we are ten thousand histories producing, and we can't escape that. I was embarassed (sic), today, when we went to McDonald's (we always go to McDonald's on Christmas Eve, it's the Knox Lame Tradition), when my father came in he said loudly that if the TV wasn't turned off he was leaving, which we all shushed profusely and he backed down but when we sat down he asked everybody if they were watching the TV, then turned off the sound, my mother meanwhile was enlisting me and my Uncle in gathering napkins to wipe down the table. We are very middle class people. No matter what I do in life, I'll be a middle class white guy doing it, and sometimes that irks me. But you can't escape histories. Not your own, not anybody else's. Historical forces snowball and dominate each of us, they shape our reality and our selves and our interactions. The best we can do is try to recognize them and try to overcome them - personal initiative is something I frown on on some level so I'm not happy with how this is coming out, but I do think it's important, to see how you've been shaped and are being shaped and to recognize that there is not really you, just these ten thousand colliding histories, but that some can be catalyzed and some can be inhibited. I dunno. Maybe the best thing to do is to pour some eggnog and watch a movie with the family. History may be important, but it's also just made up. Quiet, humdrum activities, on the other hand, are real, and if you can't enjoy them your life will not be worth much.
3:32 PM