These are some of the headlines from today’s Washington Post Express:

• Budget Will ‘Bankrupt’ U.S.
• 17 People Die in Plane Crash
• Alaskan Volcano Is Poised to Erupt
• Officer Declared Brain Dead
• Teen Boy Dies After Tasered
• 93 Monks Arrested in China
• 1 Dead After Biker Brawl in Australia
• Man Charged in 3 Killings
• Loudoun Police Find 2 Bodies

Oh yeah, and these:

• Big Boi Ventures Out Alone
• Methods for Madness

Read the whole issue here.

It’s all rainbows and smiles and giggling babies. Great.

A friend just sent me this short film by Bruce Branit, called “World Builder.” Holographic ingenuity peppered with sentimentality. I like it. You should, too.

It always lies within perambulatory distance. Not quite at a teasing and unattainable horizon, but always much closer. Much much closer. Within the very tangible physical spaces that one can calculate in a fraction of a second, down to the obsessive minutiae: the number of strides, leaps, twists, turns. Every imaginable hurdle. Every languid slump of exhaustion.

But yet, it still lies there. Just being observed. Wanted. Judged. Excused. Saved for later.

Mostly because this Sense of Purpose seems very dull. Duller than the daily monotony that frustrates and tears at you while you fantasize about this wretched S.O.P. You see your potential, curled up into a fetus, slowly decaying away. Separated only by a few moves, leaps, and dodges.

The whole exercise reeks of reticent schizophrenia. Multiple realities. Multiple motivations. Multiple multiples. And yet you were never good at math. So your existential arithmetic, or lack thereof, reduces you to a feeble lump of motivational arrhythmia. Of course, what follows next is a long-winded and hardly-fulfilling sway of acquiescence between a distant sense of purpose and the passive boredom of stagnation. You only brave that leap intellectually, from a distance. The physicality is too difficult, so you brush it off as “a mundane superficiality in aesthetics.” But that is not what it is. And you know it. Naturally, the power of repetition lies in its capacity to dull and persuade. So you believe it. And continue to sway back and forth. Never really here. Or there. Or anywhere. Except in your head.

Meanwhile, that Sense of Purpose, that sticky little fetus that has barely figured out the existence of its own limbs, slowly cruds up and expires along with your own physical existence. Simply because your mind is petrified by the potential stagnation and pressure of purpose. Almost as much as it dreads your current motivational suicide.

Does fear ever warrant the banality of disregard and waste? If it does, then where does one find the anesthesia for time?