“How are you doing?” is the other pleasantry that annoys me. I think I’ve made my peace with it. It isn’t a real question; it is a greeting like “hello”. What gets to me is that these two questions remind me of the disconnect I feel from the world where everyone is confident with the answers to those questions. Even now I’m getting frustrated at having to attempt to express this. I don’t want to talk about what’s new with me or how I’m doing because I am so disinclined to participate in your world that there is hardly any overlap with mine. There is nothing to talk to you about except the lowest common denominator: television shows, the job, the weather. There is nothing new to report and no day is distinguished from another because I do not have the energy to be here with you unless it is going to matter. Unless it is going to be real.

Sometimes my life feels like my job: I’m exhausted by doing hardly anything. I’m burning out. Even on autopilot the fuel has to come from somewhere. Why should I do anything about it? What compelling reason is there? Man delights not me.

So I think it might be helpful to recollect the things I have achieved. Not in a boastful, resting on my laurels sort of way. But to remind myself that I am the same person who did all of those things. Try it yourself when you are feeling somewhat less than.

Here are some of the things I have accomplished so far:

1. Learned to program in BASIC when I was 8 years old
2. Wrote a computer game when I was 10 and sold one copy
3. Learned to ride a bike
4. Learned to play the trombone
5. Wrote and directed Welcome to the Real World during my senior year of high school
6. Wrote and performed skits and monologues in front of hundreds of people
7. Learned to drive a stick shift
8. Was class Treasurer and class Chaplain
9. Was a National Merit Scholar
10. Read the entire Bible
11. Graduated high school
12. Won best supporting actor for my performance in Off Kennedy’s Yacht
13. Won best playwright for All We See and Seem
14. Helped make the short film K
15. Wrote a thesis on Interactive Fiction
16. Ran a massively multiplayer interactive fiction game as my senior writing project in college
17. Saw Pink Floyd in concert
18. Drove across the U.S. both East to West and North to South
19. Learned how to build my own computer
20. Filmed, directed and edited the documentary Goodbye, Hello
21. Graduated college
22. Survived six car accidents, unscathed
23. Convinced someone to marry me
24. Created presentations for the biggest company on earth
25. Owned a house
26. Survived a divorce
27. Taught myself Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Poser, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects
28. Won a short fiction contest with my story The Numbers Game
29. Published a chapbook of poetry called Poem-Shaped Lies
30. Solved Myst III without any hints
31. Adapted The Warlock of Firetop Mountain into a module for Neverwinter Nights. It won a contest created by the publishers of the book. (The British) Steve Jackson played it and wrote me a letter of congratulations.
32. Checked in to a mental institution
33. Checked out of a mental institution
34. Made love to beautiful women
35. Stood naked on top of a volcano
36. Adopted a pregnant cat
37. Won a Telly award for my piece on the New Mexico Jazz Workshop
38. Had a crisis of faith
39. Learned how to break up with girls
40. Dual-wielded .45mm pistols
41. Published another chapbook of poetry called From the Ashes of Puppets
42. Won a fiction contest with my story My Strychnine Valentine
43. Sued the DEA and won
44. Learned how to make friends in a new city
45. Lived in at least 9 different cities
46. Performed slam poetry in five major cities
47. Created and published a board game called House of Whack
48. Created a web comic called Dream Job
49. Held my own with John Hodgman
50. Was a guest columnist for Secure Immaturity
51. Created and organized a film festival for women filmmakers called Something Real
52. Learned how to practice authenticity and integrity
53. Helped create a bumper for Fantastic Fest called Lollipop
54. Created a board game and beer meetup called Boards ‘N Brews
55. Performed improv comedy
56. Had an existential crisis
57. Beat Mischa in Wiz-War
58. Published The Stork
59. Filed my taxes in January
60. Saw the last night launch of a space shuttle
61. Designed hundreds of web sites
62. Avoided ever breaking any bones in my body
63. Have, at one time or another, lost everything I thought I needed to survive
64. Did what was right instead of what was easy

It was me.

He turned to look over his shoulder at someone out of my view. He had a wild, warm look in his eye.

I wasn’t alone.

In the end, the Tower becomes a lighthouse and I am contented to look out at the mystery of the ocean.

And I am okay.

The language is always going to be an issue. As I learned from The Invisibles, we’ve only been taught half the letters of the true alphabet. This entire experience is created in language and there are things I have no words for.

What I’ve learned from conversations and responses to my inquiry “Why are you doing this?” is that, to various extents, we are all making this up as we go along. We have constructed customized realities, an elaborate latticework of experiences, ideas, and feelings. Parts of these realities are attached to fixtures seemingly independent, though we have also created those fixtures (but have forgotten, forsaken, distanced ourselves from them).

We seek out consensus to reinforce and reaffirm. Each module of the reality, or each “fact”, varies in the amount of consensus needed and this also varies from person to person. Many modules have so much consensus that they give the appearance of being factory installed. This is the realm of macro-level concepts like physics and social mores. Heavy consensus modules require little effort from the individual. So many people believe in the thoughtform that only a tiny processing cycle per person is required to maintain it. These thoughtforms appear inflexible and unassailable.

In isolation, away from consensus, rogue realities flourish. This isolation is also rooted in some inaccessibility of language: the newborn, the person in a foreign country, the person stranded on an island, the child born deaf, blind and mute. What would your reality look like if stripped of consensus? If you could invent new words because it didn’t occur to you that it “just wasn’t done”? There seem to be so many wonderful things in the realm of low-consensus thoughtforms. Cats share wisdom, pots boil when you look away, stars grant wishes, and real love only needs one person to believe in it.

I kept hearing people say variations of “This is what feels right to me.” They had invented purpose for their life and given themselves tools to measure it. But it isn’t usually described that way. There are always these pre-existing tools. There are outside influences. There is a need to distance oneself from from these other factors in order to validate the whole arrangement. We need something that is Not Us. But I think these pre-existing circumstances are invented as well. It is a conspiracy of dissociated terrorist architects. Ask all the ants how the anthill got there and each will point at the other ants. It’s a paradox.

I also kept getting “Make your own meaning.” I think I’m afraid to. I think it might be lonely. And it lead to a thought that I’m still trying to get a handle on: If we’re inventing reality on our own terms and part of that involves creating forces in opposition to us (challenges, measurements, shadows, counterbalance), then the things that are “false” about us (“You’re not smart enough”, “You’re not a good musician”, “You will never find true love”) are actually true. If we think we need them to be.

First of all, this is a genuine inquiry on a fundamental human level. Not an intellectual exercise, not a platform for theological discourse, but a sincere examination of something that spins constantly in my mind. Secondly, I am not here to indite your beliefs or ask you to defend anything you believe. I do, however, want you to explain *why* you believe. Honestly, as a human being.

I find myself in an existential crisis. The nature of reality has become more uncertain than it has ever been for me. I don’t see how anyone can be certain of anything at all, how anyone can truly *know* any answers.

I’m not a Christian because one day I realized I just wasn’t. It wasn’t for me. I wasn’t doing Christian things and had no interest in them. I believe God exists and that Jesus loves me, but I do not feel that love nor do I feel any love for Him. Not out of ill will or evil. It is just a fact that I don’t have those feelings and I don’t want to have those feelings. I think it is unhealthy to suggest that you love someone because they love you or because they died for you without involving you in that decision.

I asked someone about their idea of heaven and they explained it would be an eternity involving nothing but singing praises to God. This filled me with dread and revulsion. I could imagine nothing more boring and awful. I don’t want to live forever. The idea seems unnatural to me.

So I stopped being a Christian because I wasn’t interested in the package, not because I didn’t believe it was true.

Recently, the tenets of Christianity, and, peripherally, any faith, have become more and more preposterous to me. Let me clarify: I’m not calling into question whether something is true. I am calling into question the line of reasoning that would allow someone any sort of certainty about the machinations of reality (both seen and unseen). I get the sense of some fundamental, root level absolute reality, unknowable in its very nature, run through the sieve of limited human intelligence, social mores and politics.

And I’m not talking about translations of the Bible, so-called contradictions, etc. I am wondering how the information presented in the Bible is compelling enough for people to form an entire outlook on reality. And how someone could feel that outlook is more valid than any other.

Personally, my outlook on reality can be summed up this way: What I feel is real. Ultimately, the decisions and actions I take are based on how they will make me feel. This means I may believe in “irrational” things. I am aware of physics, laws, etc., but, honestly, I am going to go with my heart. So a derivative of this philosophy is that something need not exist to be real. An event can be fictional and still be True. To bring this back to the point, it is not important to me whether or not something actually happened for it to have meaning. I don’t care if there was an Adam and Eve, but there is truth in that story.

However, I cannot let go of a desire for certainty. For whatever reason, I want to know what is Really Going On. Right now I feel like I have a collection of various stories that sometimes overlap. The stories are a way to explain an experience. But I feel it is preposterous to say any story is a definitive instrument to measure reality. I hear accounts from Christians, Buddhists, New Agers and Atheists and I experience a growing dread that these perspectives are flawed on a rudimentary level, like a slide rule is being used to measure love. Or the fact that we have built these perspectives is abhorrent in itself.

So, the question I pose to you is: Why are you doing this? “This” being existence. Discuss.

I’ve discovered that describing what is happening to me only makes it worse and is sometimes actually harmful. So let’s just say I am discontented on a deep, fundamental level. And I am alone in this. It is something for me to figure out on my own.

There is nothing to be understood here. It has been my experience that people want to do or say something to “make it better”. If you wonder if there is something you can do: you are already doing it. I have already made arrangements with you, but you may not have recognized them as such.

Trust me, you are all doing a fantastic job.

And then it was gone and I had to do my laundry.

So this is an apology to all of the wonderful women who just seem so right, who just make so much sense. I’m sorry. Just think of me as a visitor to your planet, bound by alien directives and customs. It will be easier to explain my behavior that way. I’m sorry. You did not stand a chance against the avatar, the one I am moving toward as the sun moves toward the sea. I don’t want you to save me.

I typically feel anxiety which rapidly snowballs into paranoia. Fantastical ideas about the people I know and their dark plots against me bloom in my mind. I realize how their supposed friendship was all just an elaborate ruse engineered to destroy me. No one actually cares about me and indeed they wish me harm. So I must be wary and watchful, striking first if I can. I peer out at the world from behind a veil, sensing that some unprecedented event is imminent. I fear that I will fall up into the sky or fly apart into my component molecules. The world fills with weird angles and indictments emanate from magazine ads and YouTube videos.

That’s how it usually goes. But in these past few years of doing actual work on these issues, they haven’t disappeared so much as become familiar monsters which I know how to handle. Having help in these times is an unexpected joy. I typically just go it alone, re-emerging on the other side. So I am very thankful for her.