I don’t exist to tick stuff off but to do things.  Things that I enjoy – not in the hedonistic kind of way but more of an Ayn Rand way – albeit tempered with a degree of dogmatic Calvinist fatalism. Anyway I knew that the list isn’t the journey but the destination and that travelling a direct line through it to 101 ticks isn’t what life’s about for me.  But, now that it existed I owe it to myself to enjoy the completion of tasks and that I must work hard to finish them well.  Ticks will become the currency of happiness and the markers of a job well done.  I would become a slave to it.  Then I would rebel and not do them because they were there on this list.

Anywho.  I am now constantly torn.  Do them or not do them?  Delete the list or tick another thing off?  I want to do these things, but I want to do them because I want to, not because they are on some stupid list.  But I also know that I want to get 101 ticks and hold my head up high as a self motivated, task completing, job done kinda guy.  A starter finisher.  So the list surives another day.  I’ll go comment on something instead of mooching here (number 88) and that will make me worry less (number 18) and be happier (number 101).  Cool.

Why do I feel obligated to enter into hopeless things that afterwards make me feel unhappy.  I visit a number of sites (including some that I run myself) and post things not because I want to or need to but because I think others expect it of me.  It’s like as a long standing “community” member I have some sort of duty to get into various things.  Do things, read things, write things.

When really I just want to delete my account and go outside.  I’ve seen a trend in people deleting their accounts instead of not posting.  I think about the whys and whats of them leaving for almost several seconds.  It will not be different for me.  Only I’ll be outside so I won’t care.

After the entering the haiku contest I took my dog out and walking in the local woods for an hour in the rain.  This was far more fulfilling and filled my head with better images than any written word.  Nature isn’t a series of 5-7-5 moments, not even in 16C Japan.  Really.  Anyway you can’t possibly read my haiku and see what I see, only a representation of what you’ve seen, or if you know me maybe what you think I’ve seen.  This isn’t like 16C Japan.  A time and place where all readers had a common structure, rituals and rules.  The view out of a readers window was not that different from your own.  This is not at all so now.  That’s why I like senryu.

Haiku means boiling down or dumbing down nature to a thin film of itself hopefully to represent some abstract truth or beauty.  Read too many and you see the shallowness of this.  There is no shared context.  So why pretend you see a deeper meaning?  Noone likes to appear stupid.  This is the Japanese trick of Haiku.  It’s more about saving face than about inner truth.  Thus it is with website posting.