#111

Wow! Post one hundred and eleven! That is the birthday Bilbo Baggins celebrates at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings! One Gross! Three ones in a row! One plus one plus one is three! Without question, one of the best and most special numbers of all!  

Incredible. It is a small and factually pointless thing, but I am brimming with joy to be writing this one hundred and eleventh post.

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Sometimes you wake up empty. The world has faded in the suprareal ur-presence of the Void. You know that you are only alive out of a tired and irrational sense of duty. Your best weapons and armor, which you worked so hard to forge in the fires of putting one foot in the other despite it all and tempered in the water of not putting a decisive and irrevocable end to your own life, have shattered and fallen to the ground, not for the first time, and once again you face the truth: there is no reason to live, and there is no significance in existence.

All I got is, don't stop kicking your feet when you feel like you're floating weightless and without value to anyone and nothing but the most loathsome burden to what passes for your own self. Hope they find the ground again. That final trumpet's coming no matter what, and you might find the fire and the water once again before the end. You've survived a lot already. Even if you don't realize it, it made you stronger. Coming face to face with death and fighting your way back to life--there is nothing else that makes one stronger.

I think it's worth the fight, for the times when you don't have to. I think you can always at least try to get up one more time, pick up the hammer one more time, hit the forge one more time. 

When we all lay down our arms one day, when the last of us is dead and gone, it won't have mattered, sure, but it won't have mattered that it didn't matter if you make it matter. You are free to determine the significance of your own life, on your own terms.

Personally, I consider life significant and valuable, when I am thinking clearly. Yes, I am one of those madmen that believe in freedom. Therefore, I respect agency. Do what you are going to do.

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Well, I was going to write some more stuff about something else--something funny, maybe, or perhaps bolster what I was saying by talking about Seneca, but I walked away to eat some dinner and as I ate a movie with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler where the former played a brilliant but potentially questionable lawyer and the latter played some kind of maddened Deep State ultratactician going dark justice held me to the end through commercials, a rare occurrence because walking away and watching it later is such an easily available option. Then I got sucked into watching the Grammies with my dad. My dad's a fun dude and these Grammies aren't at all as bad as some I've seen, but I resent having a television in the kitchen. 

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One hundred and eleven! 111! 


--JL