[Morning freewrite]
I am dreaming about the trail constantly.  Anxious dreams.  Waking me up in
the early morning hours.  Dreams that I am off the trail and can't get back
on.  Dreams of being distracted and ensnared in people's lives (last night
someone wanted to play basketball.)  I'd rather be hiking.

I need to finish my sleeping bag liner so I can get started on my tarp.
Yesterday I was going to work on it.  I only succeeded in getting it
downstairs to find a flat surface to cut on.  I don't know what's wrong with
me beyond the usual depression thing.  I need to overcome the need to do
everything exactly right.  I need to get to the point in life as well as
writing where I can make mistakes.

The rain is coming down down down.  I've started a short story about it.
It was first person and I changed it to second person.  I think I may change
it back.  I'm not sure.  My voice is strongly a second person voice.
reflective, stream of consciousness, .... I don't know.  Second person is
like first person.  But different.  You can know everything that goes on in
the "you" of the story's head.  So you are second person omniscent.  A
combination of third person and first person.  It's a great voice.  But I'm
writing about me in this story so perhaps theere's no need to write in that
voice....

I'm having problems ending it.  Once again, I know where I wnat to go but
I'm having troubles making the leap from where I am into that.  The
transition is the problem.  There are ideas that I don't want to come out
and say.  I want the reader to come to understand it without me having to
say so.  But it's hard.  I have no idea in this case.  Perhaps I've spent
too much of my life learning how to be blunt.  Afterall people never
understood me when they used to talk to me.  I talk in circles and thoughts
that move around subjects.  People are used to reaching in and grabbing an
idea to throw directly back out at you.  It's hard to unlearn years of
carefully hoarded communictaion skills.  Yet necessary.  Because internally
I have the need to obfuscate, to examine from different sides; if I ever
reach that central idea, I've gone too far.  What's the purpose of writing
then?  You can simply skip to the end.

A well crafted work is one in which you ccan see the central idea by the
end, but you have never had it mentioned by the author.

Reservoir Dogs, do people die or not?  Lost Highway, is it circular in time
or do we end up with a character who replicates things he thinks have
hapened?  The Usual Suspects... we are lead along the garden path until the
end when we find something different all at once.

Where are we?  Where are we going?  I don't know anymore.  Have I ever?

Does it bother me?
[End morning freewrite]

I have arrived at the conclusion that I am not anti-science,
anti-rationalist, but that most people do not see the beauty in science and
rationalism.  Beauty exists in wholes.  In being able to wrap your mind
around a picture larger than yourself.  Most people do not and cannot.  We
are taught science and math and history and so on as a sequence of little
concepts.  As pieces of things that we can understand individually.  That is
part of the scientific method -- reduce problems down into smaller, more
managable problems.  But in the end, to understand and appreciate the beauty
of hte systems we are trying to solve, we have to step back and see the
whole picture.  We have to see how each intricate piece moves in time with
every other piece.  We have to transcend our limitations and take in the
beauty of the whole.  Otherwise, it's just mindless problem solving.