Mental

Questions

It's morning again. Rise and shine or go back to bed. What does it matter? There's a million things to do because there always is. Get some stuff done today and there'll certainly be more for you tomorrow.

But it's gotta go somewhere. It's gotta be takin' me somewhere worth heading! That's the trickery, the magic spell to keep that smile on your face. Always with that smile, that positive attitude. Where would we be without that good old positive attitude?

In a rut, I suppose. A place where nothing means anything anymore. Out of all things I could think about, I try and forget the rut.

A lot of stuff is unanswered. Say I have a question and I tinker with my limited knowledge, or look into a book somewhere until I come up with a satisfactory answer. Is this inquisitive episode over? Maybe momentarily. I could say that for now I have enough answers to be satiated and competent to battle my respective tasks.

However, I can't help but feel that the answer to this question will be so very damn interesting that tomorrow I'll have not one but three questions. I guess when these wonderings arise I'll extinguish them too with another frenzied search for knowledge. They'll take me late into the night, but I'll answer these new questions too.

Shit. Today I'm fairly certain I've got nine questions. How come it feels as if the more I move in the right direction the further behind I fall? Don't answer that, who knows how much more crippling the next questions will be. At any rate, insofar as the answers produced peak one's curiosity enough to generate more than one question in response to every answer we'll be chasing our tails everyday while we get further and further away from them.

At some point I'll be so far away from my tail that I'll probably question if I can even get to it, ever. Well there's nothing to lose in chasing for a few more days. I'll chase it for a few more days. Maybe this'll turn into a few months, and if I'm really motivated—or too scared to stop—a couple years. But after a few years that tail is going to be pretty far away. How many unanswered questions have I accumulated now? It's gotta be in the hundreds of thousands.

At this point I'll take a brief pause from my run. I'm out of breath you see. I'll stop chasing this tail and I'll stand right where I am. I'll look at the tail. Perhaps it's about a football field away. I can see it has stopped too. I take a few steps forward. It takes nine steps forward. Puzzled, I stop again. It stops. I take two steps. It takes five.

Eureka! What am I doing? I sit down on the grassy field and I look into heaven's skies. Up there I see all my questions. The hundreds of thousands of confusing enigmas are spiraling through this great big blue thing. They look like shooting stars of a multivariate of colors. There's so many of them that you can't even see the sun. That's right, the world is bathed in this weird dark hue because there's so many questions the light is literally being blocked out. So I'm lying down now, panting from years and years of what I thought was a productive chase and this whole conundrum dawns on me. Good god there's so many of them. And I can feel their weight pushing down on my chest.

Was it simply a matter of direction? Did I run the wrong way? Maybe I took a wrong turn. I feel hopeful again so I get up. I stand up, gather myself. I was panicking but now I've got a solution. I look across the field at the tail far away and I turn away from it. I start walking. I walk a day, maybe a few months, maybe a year.

Now I'm really tired, and it's still dark so I'm not entirely hopeful. I haven't looked back this entire time. I feel my whole body getting anxious as I start to turn my head. Sweat erupts from my forehead. I look back.

I can't see my tail anymore. Just as I realize this, out of the sky a great big bolt of lightning shoots down. It hits me right on the head and I collapse into a series of electrical spasms. I feel like synapses are snapping somewhere deep in my soul and now I'm lying face up on the ground, paralyzed. I can't move. So I just lie there, in the dark, fundamentally lost.