11:02, Sunday.  First day of October and I’m sitting here wondering what I should be doing.  Because there’s always that feeling, the suspicion that there is some one particular thing that would be better to use up this time in doing.  That one task, or that one goal that is more worthy of the irrecoverable minutes that keep slipping by.  No matter how hard I stare at the clock, I can’t make it slow down.  I can’t read into the seconds and discern what they want from me.  What do they want?  What would fill them with justification?

That feeling of wasting time sneaks up on me occasionally, and frustrates me.  What is that, wasting time?  I’m not sure I know what I mean when I feel it.  I talk to myself, trying to instil some kind of motivation to do ’something.’  But what?  What is better than what I’m doing, at whatever given time?  As if there is some objective ranking system that, once consulted, will provide me with a conclusive answer.  Where is this yardstick?  Who is holding it?  Certainly its not me most of the time.  Things I want to do, in the moment, are often the ones that I turn around and feel like I’ve wasted time on.  Am I bred this way?  Is it society, or just my family that’s made me into the permanently inefficient creature that I feel like I am?

What are we all working towards?  That is the common denominator, that I am always supposed to be working on something, or toward something.  A goal, many goals, dozens of them, handfuls of long term, short term, financial, physical, fiscal, business, career, hobby… goals.  Swarms of the fuckers.  So many goals in fact that were I to by some miracle actually achieve one, I’d have amassed so many more in the process that I would be numb to the accomplishment.  I’d be so caught up in whatever else I should be doing that I’d forget that at one point, I wasn’t where I am.

I can’t remember sometimes.  My mind is geared forward.  I’m aware of the present, and yet only inasfar as it applies to the future.  Is what I’m doing now going to net me some profit in the future?  That is the question I think everyone is constantly asking.  Subconciously, but continually.  Its like breathing these days, we can’t live without it.  Living in the moment, enjoying what you have is laziness, smug self-satisfaction.  Forget that you worked to get where you are- that really isn’t important.  Achieving goals is not the goal.  Working on goals, that’s the obsession.  Like a train that builds its own rail, we never get where we’re going because there’s always a new chunk of track to chug into.  We don’t even get to stop at the station and take in the view.  Always got to have our noses to the stone, driving new spikes into the ties.

Where does that leave us?  Rats in the wheel… slaves in our own terrible schemes.  Those abstracted systems of business, of wealth and success.  We count out our worth to ourselves in arbitrary numbers that mean exactly what we want it to mean- no more, no less.

Is this why I feel so lost sometimes, because I realise that there are no destinations?  I seek madly for a finish line, a goal, one that is inarguable, and what I find is that I get into my head that the only concievable end is to arrive at the absolute pinnacle of whatever the field is.  To be the best.  The very best.  Only then can I stop, justifiably.  And that simply won’t work in this world of one-ups-manship.  Its all reletive anyway- and some bastard will set their sights on me, if I did manage to claw my way clear of the rabble, and beat me.  Then, where am I?  Back in the wheel.  Back amongst the rats.

Maybe the flaw is me.  Maybe my own self-appraisal is broken, I can’t make myself feel like my own work is worth something just because I say so. But I’m not sure which is more arrogant, feeling like I’m not a product of my society, or feeling like I am, and know it, and don’t care.  Should I seek for the approval, or… at the least a reaction a goddamn flicker of an eyelash out of someone else… Should I concern myself with it at all?  One tiny ripple in the stagnant pool of this world would be something, it would be something I could hold on to, remember, and use to tell myself I do exist, I do matter.  Or is that insecurity?  Which do I choose?  How can I live, unrecognised, in a world that constantly tells me that what I say doesn’t matter?  That unless I do what everyone else does, I’m not right?  How can me doing what they all do matter?  Wouldn’t it matter infinitely more if I ran counter to the flow?  To interrupt the current and splash around in that stream would at least be interesting.  How can repeating the same fucking thing that hundreds of other mindless automotans have done before mean anything at all?

11:28, almost tomorrow… just like those goals.  Tomorrow… so close, and will never come.  Almost tomorrow, and no closer to my answers.