DOUBTS AND DREAMS

September 10, 2001

If you have read everything on this page, you can probably appreciate that this is a pretty big project for me.

My wife is 14 years older than me. She retired 6 years ago. We have a 9-year-old daughter. I have no job other than painting. I've put everything on hold to focus on this project. Without tapping into our very limited retirement accounts, our go-broke date pretty much coincides with the launch-date of this website.

I imagine every possibility. I consider all the colors.

Sometimes this project seems so unrealistic to me. Mostly, when I explore my doubts, my fear is that the effort will be ignored. That people are and always have been so engrossed in their own slice, that they wont suspend their concepts long enough to adequately consider my thought, which is about everything.

That's what I see when I look around me. I see people who are totally obsessed with their own worlds. Most people live and die without questioning their worlds too much. Few will ever truly step outside, and immerse themselves in something that is totally different, unless they are forced to.

That happens from time to time. People find themselves banging up against a different belief system, a different culture, a different race or economic class. This is usually a time of tension and conflict. Sometimes this leads to war.

I use to have a reoccurring dream as a child that I was in a foxhole with bullets ripping into the mud just inches from my head. I would deeply experience what the terror must be like. I'd know that I would have to move or die, and know that when I moved I'd probably die anyway. It's going to hurt. 18 years old. The touch of the wife and kid. Those friends I will never see again. If only I could sit on a park bench just one last time and watch the clouds.

Bang. I'm dead.

A lot of people sacrificed their lives and futures just like that. I myself just missed Vietnam. Wars are going on somewhere today. As you read this, there are people hunkered down in foxholes.

I always think about stuff like that.

Shouldn't I, who have such pleasant circumstance in comparison; shouldn't I also be willing to sacrifice it all?

And so I always have.