on this cold and windy night i set out to write this. nothing in particular was established when i sat down to write this, and so what becomes of this session is left to chance and of course the whims of my heart.
towards the end of this past week i sat in the park with my friend from work under a cloudy and rather damp day. thinking back, i believe it was this past friday. Nevertheless. . .

a new person started working at our job and i asked my friend what she thought of this new person and her response was something that struck me and has been recycled over and over again in my mind. She said to me, "i like her, i found her to be more human then the rest (of our co-workers). . . ." so its a simple comment, but if we think it through it has tremendous depth and has infinite value as social commentary of modern society and of the modern human condition. She found her more human then others. this i found fascinating in the context of my thought about the artifical human construct that has been assembled in a society that is attempting to make us less human. Get this, the main reason why we go the movies is because of the human emotions that movies are able to make us feel. Fear, sadness, anger, joy, tenderness, an understanding of another persons situation . . . . but these are all emotions that we experience without actually interacting with another human. It is to say, we pay $10, we are plugged into some outlet like robots, and made to feel human. We pay $10 to be made to feel human. To experience what it is to be human. But i argue that this is another artificial construct since we are experiencing these things in a vacuum, in isolation. Because we lack so many of these emotions in our structured, mundane lives, we need some way of reminding our "souls" that we are humans, emotional and "spiritual" beings (i place souls and spiritual in quotes to denote the fact that, regardless of how i dismiss spiritually, i cannot negate its existence as a real phenomenon of human society).

i have another coworker who i sometimes (though not often) also go to the park with. He is from China and enjoys debating ethics and we often engage in philosophical discussion. A few weeks ago, we sat in this park on a fresh sunny afternoon during our lunch break and i proposed to him a question, "do you believe in destiny?" knowing his reasoning i was surprised by his response when he remarked in an exclamatory manner, "of course i believe in destiny !" at this point i was expecting the usual rant of how we are all put on this earth for a reason and that this purpose falls in line with destiny and etc. But chuckling he grins, "Erick, of course i believe in destiny. We all have the same destiny. The exact same destiny. We are all going to die !"
i found this engenous. My dear reader, you may not, but i found this quite comical.
Well not getting into it much further, because i know that you as my reader do not have the time to spare, and i don't either (at least i would like you to think so) . . . . i will say, that although we agreed on this, we have very different philosophical views on life. He is of the thought that nothing really matters, that humans are so insignificant in the universe and that any day we could all disappear and the entire human race and all its history could be wiped out forever (lets say by an asteroid) that really nothing matters in the end. to this perspective i argue that the present is important. i say to this extent that if nothing matters, then why not try to lessen human suffering while this meaningless existence is played out because the present is real and tangible. in defiance i raise my fist and exclaim, "so be it, let the image of me lending my hands to my brothers and sisters, helping them to their feet, be burned into the horizon of the last day for all to see ! ! ! "