The Second Hand Unwinds...

So once again we are hammering on 8,200. Word probably got out that the job loss numbers in the past month were nowhere near 500k, more like 700k which is pretty epic. In the words of Linus Van Pelt , I feel a strange sense of calm. Who knows why. Personally, and professionally I am hardly at the apex of my career. Honestly, I feel like I am dead. I feel like some part of me is gone and will never return. And it feels good. I feel like I don't have to feel things anymore. Like I don't have to breathe air, almost. I walk by people and their lives seem to flow along invisible lines tracing through the air to me. I feel like a camera, a tape recorder - some kind of higher order device that is being used to catalogue and record everything around me. There is a book inside of me waiting to get out. Research that wants to find the light of day. It doesn't care anymore what its doing with my head, it just wants to play with other peoples heads now. Sounds. Whispers. Colors. Shapes. Sometimes I miss being alive. I miss the pain of it. The sensation. Like a girlfriend biting my nipple during sex or the feeling of her nails down my back. The cold hard shock of water shooting down your wetsuit on a beautiful winter day paddling out beyond the beachbreak. The feel of dried salt, and sweat after a sk8 session with my friends at the halfpipe we built with pieces of wood that disappeared from the construction sites in our neighborhood. I miss the fear. The wonder. When I was alive, I cared. I wondered what it would be like to change the world. Whether or not my work would ever change a single human soul. Or build something that could defeat the ravage of time. Now. I am in my second life. I am beyond my own time. I am a man out of time. I am not held in a former era. I am not bound to the present. I move in and out of the present and the future and the past. We send ourselves into a world of pain simply to be able to change spacetime. Only by being finite can we traverse and modify the infinite. Infinity times infinity is infinity.