The Flagrant Vagrant: Disregarding All The Things You Believe Are Real

YES, it is FUNNY that I sit around at home and ponder the nature of (my) existence, and I (and others...) make jokes about this, and it is ridiculous and perhaps even wasteful. BUT, I have to think about it because sometimes I worry that I may not exist at all. After all, the only real evidence I have of my existence is my belief in it. Is reality simply a very firm belief system? Whether or not I actually exist is quite arbitrary in a sense, because my 'feeling' of existence is what I am informed by. When I think of change over 31 years, it seems strange to refer to myself as the same person as I was when I was a day old. Perhaps there is some kind of genetic destination (or fate) for me, which will prove that I continue to be the same person over a lifetime, but I don't know what that destination is.

When I think about the way my life is strung together, I feel itinerant and incoherent. Like life's great temporal vagrants, who perhaps eek out a successful and peaceful existence merely by continuing to exist, I feel as if I am not properly strung together, as if I experience myself and the world in a homeless state. And with flagrant disregard to the temporal conventions. You must be persistent to exist. Existence requires space, place, time.....context, and a degree of organisation.

This seems like a primary school query: how do I know if I am real?

I am sad about the absence of KF's blog, and I am currently mourning its passing. I thought about it last night after I went to bed (important thinking often happens in bed. Important events sometimes happen in my bed too) and decided that I could never delete my blog. I could remove it from the net, but I couldn't delete all these words. Because I know that I can't erase the things that I have already thought, said and written. They are, in a sense, indelible, and I need them to prove to myself that I have existed at times other than now. I wonder who the most legitimate 'I' is? Is it the one I am occupying at this very second, or a culmination of all the ones that have gone before today? The ones that are written into pages? Perhaps it is also about immortality. This body can't always exist, but perhaps something/one I have been can continue to exist?

At some point you can convince yourself that nothing matters, but it isn't true. It does.

I was thinking AW and EJ, you really owe it to AJ to keep diaries of this time. Imagine how valuable it will be to her when she is older, imagine how it will change her world.