the next ten minutes or eternity

What's the deal with this blog?

You and I both know people who are good at planning. Perhaps you are one of those types. There's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in this, and much indeed to be proud of. (Translation: Be ashamed.)

I hate to plan. I can plan out a week, a month, or a year ahead, sure, but for me it feels like someone putting a pillow over my head and slowly suffocating me. I struggle to see the point of it because I find it challenging to think of the future as real. More precisely, I don't think of my future self as real.

When I think of my daughters learning to drive or graduating or joining the Peace Corps or marrying or starting a rock band, I can picture them with their sisters. Sometimes their mom is in the picture. But I'm not part of the scene. Just not at all.

(Note: This post is not one of those subtle cries for help or an intervention. I promise you that you will not have the opportunity to whisper to friends, "...and yet he seemed so happy...I just don't...understand." To begin with, you'd never say that anyway. You'd probably say, "dude, I always thought he was joking..." But I won't give you the opportunity even to say that. So relax.)

Here are the two time frames through which I view the future:

1. The next ten minutes.

2. Eternity.

Now of course I'm exaggerating to make a point. Sometimes I look twenty minutes out.

Putting sillines aside for a moment, I can say I do sense that I dwell in these time frames far more than do most people, and I spend far less time, I think, than most people do in anticipating or planning for the next weeks, months or years.

It seems so pointless to me, just a bad exercise in hubris and wishful thinking.

That being said, I'm really glad that there are folks who plan for (and attempt to mold) the future. I appreciate these people in much the same way I'm grateful that smart and thoughtful people balance the books of major corporations. Things would fall apart without these good, careful, earenest, responsibile, stewardship-minded people, but it doesn't mean (does it?) that I need to be that kind of person myself in every respect.

And as for all this, my blog resembles that remark!

Imagine plotting one's thoughts and the events of one's life on a continuum of profundity, with one end being pure minutiae and the other end being the "great big thoughts." The middle ground is most everything, the place that most of us live 90+% of the time. Picking up the kids. Planning and making meals. Working on a report. Reading the newspaper. Scrambling around searching for one's keys. Looking at one's ever shrinking portfolio. Trying to figure out why the vacuum is making vacuum-appropriate noises but not doing vacuum-appropriate sucking.

Life stuff.

This blog has extraordinarily little life stuff, all things considered. Only incidental chronicling. No sense of normal life sequencing such as birthdays or big benchmark events. In the vein of the ten minutes/eternity dichotomy, the majority of what I discuss is either pure trivia (if angry and principled trivia--for instance, my stance on cauliflower) or serious (if stab-in-the-dark) attempts at thinking through the issues of love, death, god, godlessness, terror and joy in the pursuit of figuring out what the hell these few years as something rather than as nothing are all about.

Or my favorite: embracing both categories at once. Playfully mocking (brutalizing?) the serious and dignifying the trivial with opinions and thought. Showing how the eternal can be teased out of the tiny and transient, and showing how the big thoughts contain their own brand of silliness.

Hello. My name is Horton, and I hear whos.

Ten minutes or eternity. Trivial pursuit or soul gazing. Nothing or everything.

Or all of the above simultaneously.

But don't expect to learn from this blog about what I do in the course of a day or week or what's up with my family and friends. Or what's taking place at my work. I'll let others write that kind of blog.

And that's just fine. Terrific, in fact. (Translation: Not fine.)

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And the photos? I'll discuss them later.