The Bowl of Ashes

Listening to a combination of Air, Phillip Glass, Rob Dougan, Ikarus, and Hanz Zimmer is a hard feeling to describe. Especially when it builds on my current mood.

Imagine taking a shot of Happy Vodka and expresso just after having a handful of caffiene buzzed and wired friends show up in a frenzy of goofiness. If you are a social person, imagine they drag you out to a house party or club, if your a geek/gamer, imagine they brought their rigs over and set up an impromptu lan party. Imagine the laughter, the joking insults, and the slightly carefree dissipation of the edge of all that pointless sobriety you deal with every day.

Now invert the sensation you are imagining. Let your soul settle deeper into your self, and let your mind's eye turn inward, and drift down to the murky depths of your loneliness. Let your decisions and resolutions set further still, solidifying who you are until you know beyond any reasonable doubt that more of your defining moments are past than before you now, and your life from this point on is more a series of results than a series of inspirations.

Let the unfinished portrait of yourself, blank swathes whispering promise of what could have been, become your mascot and the most authentic artistic personification of yourself.

Remember that 2005 has begun, and that you're past the age of manhood in every culture in the world now, even America's, where we put it off as long as possible. The rites have all been completed. The payments in blood and innocence given, the wisedom and bittersweet memories that they purchased stored away in the archives of the mind.

You have abandoned or will abandon the demands of your god, the expectations of your woman, and the fashions of your culture.

You will either wither and die from here until the moment your heart stops, or you will find a way to be reborn like a phoenix from the ashes of the chaotic cataclysm that was your first attempt at adulthood. But at present, the later path seems unclear and unlikely.

Will you have the resolve to try to travel it in spite of your doubt? Will you draw from within yourself hope--the one thing you seem to have forgotten was ever in your possession?