What does it matter?
Pack a bag with a tent and a sleeping bag
Then sleep outside for a month.
Wake up with the traffic and go to the corner store for several beers.
Let the store owners learn your habits.
Go to the park and lay against a tree with your beers
Then drink till you fall asleep
And nap like a cat in the sun.
Gamble with your friends and take their money
Or give them you’re money
And do it until 730 in the morning
Shouting at each other with excitement and anger and laughs
And fun until someone can’t bet anymore.
Be irresponsible.
Smoke you’re cigarettes inside.
Have *** instead of going to work.
Who wants to be responsible all the time?
There’s a time for that.
There’s nothing wrong with letting loose and living as wild as you want to.
Just don’t be a fool and nothing’s the matter.
Indulge.
Indulging is a great thing.
Just don’t jump over the edge unless you’re attached to a bungee chord,
And if you do,
Just make sure you have someone to pull you back up
So you’re not left dangling there.

There is an empty space
Inside us
And no matter what we do,
No matter how glorious our achievements
Or how full our love
Or how deep our intelligence
Or how strong our bravery and willfulness,
The awareness of that empty space
Always returns,
eventually.
Some fight it off with happiness,
Some with success -
Which most of the time means status in money -
Some with devotion to family,
Some with simplicity of heart,
Some with indulgent misery,
Some with laughing nights at popular bars or clubs that hopefully end in *** -
Men tend to, at times of pride, feel further away from the empty space the higher their numbers get -
Some with violence or criminal lifestyles,
Some with blind addiction,
Some with righteousness or with God,
But we always go back
To that empty space.
If that’s how it is then I think
Why not?
If that’s the core of us
Why not learn to be calm in a place
Like that.
Whenever we return there after a long run
The terror is so overwhelming
That we think the only solution is to escape it.
But why not learn to live
With it?
I sit there
Day in and day out
And it’s ok.
Sometimes I’ll leave it alone there
For awhile when there is some excitement,
Something new,
Or when something is so sad
I could weep,
But I never go too far
For fear of fooling myself
With one of the many
Hopeful delusions
That claim to fill it forever.
Yes, I sit there
And wait
For something amazing
In a small world full of little that is
Amazing.

I have an old dog
Who has been dying for sometime now.
He’s got a *** leg
And bad hips
So he needs to be helped up all the time.
He mostly just lays in the same spot and sleeps;
He does it so much that a pressure sore developed suddenly,
Then got infected.
Now he smells very badly
Because of the festering wound
And he wears gauze and wraps
Like a diaper around his back legs.
He stumbles around
And takes too long to do anything.
He gets confused,
In his age,
Over what was always simple
And is almost always in pain,
But you can see, in his eyes, that he still wants to live
And to be loved.
So we haven’t euthanized him
And we still love him
But our younger, healthier dog,
Only four,
Runs up to us and seems to smile
And she jumps around in excitement
And seems to laugh
And she is much easier to love
So she gets our loves attention more
While the old boy looks at us wistfully
Until we call him over with,
“Awww, come here bud.”
To get our sad sympathetic love
More than anything else.
How many of our old
Are left rotting somewhere
With barely enough life to live
Only to be seen on occasional visits?
It’s terrible.
They annoy us with their needs.
The young do too,
But far less.
We help the young with passion,
Not pity.
Even if you call both of these love
I know which one is preferred,
Because you get far less
With the latter.
Yes, when it comes to love
It is better to be young, happy, and entertaining
Because we do it
For ourselves.