November 23, 2003

I felt ferociously creative at lunch today as Tommy, Bernard, and I bounced around ideas for our Fringe play. By the time we were done, the play became more dynamic and viciously funny, but it also lost most of its idealism. Originally, the play highlighted the tension between idealism and pragmatism, but after the re-write, the idealist sells out and the whole play turns morbid. I think I managed to inject a lot of my glum into this script.

It was the crumby New York Times feature on online dating that put me in a gloomy mood today. It suggested that we live in a world where people are endlessly drifting away, even though they’re desperately seeking one another. And while online courtship is fulfilling a deep need to reach out to other people, many online relationships are still marred by deceit and cruel indifference.

And I couldn’t help but think about my own abortive relationships, and how I’m always so far from getting what I want. I want to do something crazy and beautiful, like falling for a girl and running away with her half way around the world. But this passionate intensity is way too much, way too fast and everything explodes in a thousand bitter shards of consciousness. In the end, everyone still drifts away.

To amplify the gloom, my death clock did a wonderful job of predicting my time of death: 17 years from now. At the back of my mind I always had a premonition that I will die in dazzling suicide around the time of my 36th birthday. My existence is bound to become meaningless and unfulfilling way before then, and I have no plans of extending the farce indefinitely.

My boundless pessimism adds new shades to my life. So on the way home I stepped in the middle of the road to capture a picture of the setting sun: