While sitting in the car waiting for everyone else to load up so we can drive to the hike, I watch and listen for something to write but a thought that’s been recurring as I’ve periodically done this, especially recently as I’ve had enough free time to just sit around and try to write, is this: why can I not just stop after the watching and the listening? Why must I proceed to the writing? It changed then, when I proceed to write. I’m no long we watching and listening then. I’m thinking of words and playing other lexical games in my head, sometimes even with my eyes closed to concentrate, and sometimes even with ear plugs, closing out the world. If I wouldn’t stop to write, I could just sit and listen and watch and keeping on sitting and listening and watching and that’s all of it, that’s life. But I was raised to work, make something, contribute. Sitting around and doing nothing isn’t enough. Life in America isn’t a spectator sport. Everyone’s got to play. I’ve been getting away from it as much as I can. I gave capitalism an honest try. I looked hard for a reason to want to make money and found it when the bank took our house. And I worked hard through school and studied a marketable skill and got a job, but I was always writing. Some part of me was rebelling against the work. So now I’ve made some money and I can spend my time writing. But it feels like even writing is only a stepping stone and I haven’t completely pulled away from the perpetually-productice. I’m still trying to make use of my time and get something out of it. The watching and listening is really the important part. But maybe the writing is part of it too. It’s all life I guess because we’re living and doing it in our different ways and who’s to say one person is living and another isn’t. All our hearts are beating and we’re breathing and looking around, worrying and striving and then dying a little all the time until finally dying for good and living all the time until that point no matter what we’re doing. My personal problem is I’ve got feelings about it. I’ve got feelings about what I should be doing and occasional little reminders tell me I’m not doing it yet but it feels like I’m making progress and right now I’m thinking if it weren’t for my ego and my desire to make art that people love (and therefore, feel like they love me if they love my art) then I wouldn’t write, then I would just sit around and do nothing and watch and listen. But I’m not there yet. My ego is still within me. And it’s life now like it will still be life when and if I ever get rid of my ego and finally do nothing but maybe I can even float above my life somehow even as it is now and still live it and do it and be myself but not get so worried about what happens and so just be like a character in a movie I’m watching and be interested in the movie and even love or hate the character at times but that being nothing personal just like a story and stories happen to characters and you don’t ever get mad at a story or stay sad after it’s over it’s just a movie and it was a good one or a bad one for whatever reasons that don’t really regress to truths anyway but those people that make up the good and bad are just living their lives too and they aren’t either good or bad themselves because they make up the good or bad, they just are, and it all just is, and one day maybe I’ll just sit and watch and listen to it all be.