Middleman

"Absent whatever sparse contributions to society I've managed to cough up on a given week, I am basically a middleman between consumables and sewage." That was a pearl of wisdom from this post of your friend and mine, hipstomp. I've had time to ruminate on that since I read it, and more often than not, I'm surprised by my own ambivalence toward the implications of it. Surely, as a youth, I felt differently. I remember feeling that, yes, there must be something to life; there must be more that simply existing, consuming, etc. There should be purpose. As I've aged (and I carefully avoid using the word "matured" there), I've found I care less and less about having a grand life...a "meaningful" life, as far as that goes. On the surface, this looks like a philosophical breakdown...a failure, of sorts, especially if you subscribe to the view that life "should" have purpose if it is to be worth living. I do not, for my part, particularly subscribe to that view, but hey. I have, I believe, basically come to terms with a cold and uncaring universe, and while I don't feel that it's made me a cold and uncaring person, I can see how it might take a bit of the spring out of one's step. It does that for me, too, from time to time.

I guess it's been a bit of a downer of a week. I fell offline for most of this week, cutting me off from a major part of my "life" for a while. Class has been oozing along, and my non-class, non-sleep time has pretty much been spent in the casino experiencing a fairly poor run of cards, which means poker for me this week has been simultaneously hugely unproductive and a major time-sink. Raw deal! I keep at it mainly because, in the absence of real work, it's my only shot at making a buck, but when it doesn't work out, it can really get a body down. Nothing much to be done about that, I suppose. Class is going well, I guess...only one week left until the poker leg is finished. It is currently unknown what exactly that will mean for me as far as future classes and any immediate job prospects, but I'm predicting right now that neither one deserves an optimistic outlook for the time being. More news as it develops. Also this week, Bush signed into law the port security bill that included provisions that stab online poker in the belly, so that was sad.

Ah, and I also finished up my license application process this week by going in for fingerprinting. It was all very high-tech, which I guess I didn't really expect. No more inkpads and index cards...the whole thing was done on glass platens with electronic scanning and that kind of futuristic hoo-hah. I felt strange when it was over...just knowing that my biometrics are now stored in digital form available for any government (or unauthorized) viewing. Digital data is a strange beast: infinitely and flawlessly reproduceable, and basically impossible to destroy (short of mishandling by its owners, really). I am now in the system forever; I've made my indelible mark. Today fingerprints, tomorrow DNA, next year...who knows. Brain scans, perhaps.

It got me to thinking a little bit about identity. Not so much in the physical sense, but psychologically, how so much changes over time. Over the last, oh, few weeks, I've had occasion to talk to a couple friends about how we change as we grow older...how our lives become so different that we ourselves become different, and how that change starts to affect you. Some (perhaps rightly so) feel a sense of loss, maybe even betrayal, that you cannot, as you are now, be true to your "self" as you were then...that you leave so much behind that it can do nothing but sadden you. Some see opportunity...a chance to claim for one's self a future that previously, years ago, was completely unknown. (Your present, now, is your past's future...know what I'm sayin'?) I think a lot of times, people grow up see their presents as disappointing in some regard...what life actually becomes rarely lives up to the dreams we had in youth. In the same vein, though, one's present is almost always different than one dreamed, and in a lot of ways that can be a good thing. I, for one, know that in the past, I had envisioned several different futures for myself in adulthood, none of which are currently the case. ;) Relatedly, I am now having immense difficulty picturing what my immediate future will be like. It's certainly going to be interesting finding out.

I thought about disconnection from the past recently, as I let the "crackden.com" domain name expire. I wondered what it would be like if I let ".org" go, as well, the place I've called virtual home for, what, maybe ten years now? I think I've thought before on how "Stavro" has been becoming an increasingly inaccurate identifier for me. (How many reading this even associates that name with me.) Not that it held any particular meaning, per se, but there was definitely a time where I was Stavro, and this is clearly no longer the case. I mean, I am, but that doesn't mean anything to anyone. Indeed, probably more people identify me with flatvurm than anything else these days, and there's not really anything that connects the Flatvurm identity with the Crack Den history, save that it happens to involve the same person. That is...we all have the same fingerprints.

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Okay, so I don't really know what the point of this was. This was just a sampling of some random thinking that's been going on with me lately. I'm finding it increasingly tough to find the time and space necessary to get anything of any decent length coherently written and assembled. That's a product of my current lifestyle. Pain in the ass, sometimes. But...catch as catch can. I'm going to try to get back to this soon.