2:57 AM

The clock mocking with a yellow blinking colon dividing the 2 and 5, which in its own blocked out way looks like an electronic heartbeat crucified on the upper half of a digital cross. Television fuming phosphorescence, beaming whitish black and mesmerizing. The stove to my left breathing the only other light, spotlighting a row of common condiments. Air conditioner whirring the same pedestrian whir. And I can't sleep because I'm thinking, or because my thoughts are thinking me.

This or that, or that or this, and on and on, and the audience is snoring. Still the same routine. These days you don't seek only one spouse, but a second: your career, and that's a woman you simply can't get drunk and shack up with until you twist her arm into marriage. She's a fickle, careless, tireless, implacable, unappeasable, bitchy little thing, and once you ambivalently choose, she's with you forever, and if you screw her over she'll leave you and your spirits dropped at the door to become drinking buddies with regret and his dark-browed, death-soaked brother, depression.

C'mon, sir, what will it be: counseling, or counseling psychology, or general psychology, or clinical psychology, or psychiatry, or neuroscience, or theology, or journalism, or technical writing? The average soul-dead chap has it easy enough. He wants what will get him laid, what will support a family, what will keep him in decent standing with his friends. He isn't interested in virtually everything. There's no such thing as the torment of a decision. He isn't capable of running from himself simply because his self isn't carved out enough so as for him to be capable of running from it.

But I'm capable of running from myself. I know what I'm supposed to be doing, even if I can't tack down a career. Worry about tomorrow is an extension of running from the calling of today and grasping for artificial life, a life built on controlling the infinite array of occurrences within it, a life of breaking when the incalculable comes a-knockin', a life where I refuse to exhale. Everything must be abandoned, resigned up to God as a metaphysical burnt offering, and the smoke that rises to the heavens is a symbol for my relearning to breathe.

So I quit. Worry not for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself. Goodbye worries about the GRE, about sycophantically making the professorial check-off list for graduate school, about which career and where, getting published and saving the world. Goodbye, so long, adieu, fuck off, and all God's children said amen.

I am going to read and write and live and love and smoke my pipe and play my guitar and laugh until my face is distorted with smile lines, sanctified to God as best as I can, and that's that. And if anyone doesn't like it, there's always room on my pile of forgetting. I light it nightly as a celebration for a day spent living, and watch as the flames, dancing to dissipation, burn away the darkness, warming me until my morning comes and the trek of life wanders on.