"Good Night Sweetheart"

Blah blah blah boring. And this arrangment has some weird dissonances in it. I love dissonance, but these don't make much sense in context. Blah blah blah.

Lately I've felt aware of my impending death. Not in any predictive sense, just the awareness that I have little time on this planet, and I shouldn't waste it. I feel the need to finish things, as much as I can. I clean up and do dishes before I leave the house, I put stuff away. I'm trying to set my house in order on an ongoing basis, and not just my literal house. This tendency isn't necessarily new, except perhaps in degree. I've always thought about what I was leaving behind, particularly in the sense of not wanting to leave a mess of any sort for someone else to deal with. That hasn't made me magically capable of straightening everything out all the time, unfortunately, or of finishing everything that I've started. I'm still working on it, I refuse to give up.

There is the possibility that I'm taking this a bit too far, but I don't feel morbid about the whole thing, it's much more matter-of-fact. It feels like a very practical way to become aware of my priorities. I'm still planning for the long term, my life up to the age of 112 (so I can see the Tricentennial of our, ahem, fine country--maybe we'll be back around to that by then). I'd like to see my daughter's children, and have lots of years to enjoy my family and friends. But I just don't know what will happen.

I think about this blog as a little time capsule for my daughter sometimes. She could read this, even if I were gone, and know something of what I found important, significant enough to write down in some vaguely coherent form. I think if I hadn't made up this project for myself I wouldn't have found the opportunity to write down the more 'trivial' thoughts that make up my life. Some of them are not so trivial when I start to write. Some still are, granted. But again, the magic of writing for an audience means that even now, entirely exhausted after a very long day, I still manage to craft a few short paragraphs that fit together.