Sometimes a Sunset...

If your iTunes catalogue can't make you feel right, well, you're probably beyond help. Tonight I stumbled home with the first two days back at work full of the most heinous murder/rape imaginable, and the sudden death of a ten year old hanging in the air, and after a full few hours of collecting the pieces I was eager to be around the people that I cared about. Welcome back to the real world.

So, I grabbed some impromptu sleep, sketched with Zoey, bathed her, tinkered with our shadow machine to make sure that Peter and Big Ben looked just right, and then slipped off into the ether with Chapter 15 of Peter Pan. That was close to enough, but not quite. Matt Kearney and "Breathe In and Breathe Out"...that was enough.

How messed up is the planet? Well, very. I'd give you examples but this is a public forum and I could destroy someone's life with a sentence. Suffice it to say, it's frightening, but that shouldn't stop us from living. No, quite the opposite. It should spur us on towards really living, you know, doing it the right way...the best way that we know how. Now here's the thorn that's stuck in my paw today...

I know far too many people who are taking this life for granted...far too many people who should be doing something awesome, or at the very least fun, with their days, and who are not. I know far too many unhappy, unmotivated, excuse manufacturing, bundles of apathy and anxiety to comfort me that all of the awfulness can be combated with inspiration. Let me tell you something here if you haven't already figured it out, the fuel I burn, and burn with an embarrassing appetite, is inspiration. I need it. I have to find it. I have to create it. I have to buy it. I have to sell it. I have to hear it and talk it and see it. I have to fall asleep with it, and wake up to it, and I need...I desperately need...to see it in others. Sometimes I don't.

Then today strikes, and it hits me harder than you can imagine. We must...must...find a reason to wake up, to watch the sun rise, to fall in love, to learn, to go to work, to say kind things about one another, to be be stolen away by music, or poetry, or science, to believe in magic, to trust and try...we must...must...be inspired, or it's over. We lose.

I don't ever want to let anyone down in that regard. I want someone to always believe that I was the most inspired person they knew. I want to the one whose breath was so taken away so often that you wondered how it was that my lungs got any air, what with the all of the love and hope and happiness filling them.

We're the only mammals on the planet that watch sunsets. There's a reason.