A shriveled-up, rubber balloon, silvery-red, like the dead carcass of a strange alien creature, sits atop the moss growing on our roof shingles.

Where the balloon originated, I know not.

Or, rather, I do, if I think about it enough.

I see a parent shopping in a gift store, buying a bag of rubber sheaths ready to be filled with helium, bagged at a factory, made from a mix of petroleum products, as ancient a form as goat bladders used to hold water by prehistoric ancestors.

Who was the first person to realise bladders could also serve as air-filled flotation devices?

Who first put helium in a balloon for a party decoration?

Shall I risk my life to climb a ladder and retrieve the remnants of a child’s birthday bash, perhaps not even remembered by the child, who could have been one or two years old this time around the Sun?

Leaves swept off the roof a few weeks ago still pile across the glass tabletop of outdoor furniture on the back deck next to the lichen-covered gas grill cover, spilling over onto the moldy lumber of the deck itself.

Raindrops from a small summer storm form islets and peninsulas of wet refuges for airborne bacteria, evaporating too fast for tree frogs to alight on the skylights and lay love’s eggs in the dance of life.

Densely-packed water droplets reflect white light to my eyes, triggering my thoughts to distinguish the whiteness from the rest of the blue sky and think “clouds.”

If only my days of dancing were ahead of me, not behind me, but the sacrifice of gentle peace in my thoughts to rearrange my thought-body coordination to adjust from a nearly sedentary lifestyle to one of freestyle dancing and its associated whirlwind destruction of old habits with the only reward being the ending for my collected group of words called the next book…

Not to mention the difficulty I have dropping my guard in the presence of others.

I do not hate other people.

I am merely uncomfortable letting the real me out on the loose while feeding the people-pleasing personality in me at the same time, along with all the other personalities I feed who give me characters to write about.

I store my thoughts here, unhindered by personal security measures, no reason to hide them from others, because here is the only place I know how to be myself without having to react to others in realtime.

Here I can say phrases like I wish I was dead because I have nothing more to accomplish personally.

When I recently hung out with young people, I felt like maybe I did want to live longer because maybe I did have something more to accomplish personally, what with the sped-up treadmill effect of being in their high-energy presence.

But when I stepped off the treadmill, I returned to my base/real self.

Their joie de vivre about what they loved to do, especially making music and dancing, but also robots and other interests, infected me and made me want the same for myself.

Then I concluded I wanted the same for my self when I was 25 years old, half a lifetime ago, not 50+ years old today.

Sure, age is just a number.  Ninety-year olds are completing marathons and jumping out of aeroplanes but they were always energetic (or so I lead myself to believe).

I was never that much of an athletic type.  Sure, I sang in high school musicals, participated in high school/college marching bands and belonged to a church choir when I was 30 but only because I was pursuing a girl or bowing to peer pressure.

As I get older, I see that who I am is this person here, the way I’ve been for a long time, talking to myself in the form of diary entries, poems and short stories.

I may never finish another book.

In the past, my books, short stories and poems have been fancy, written forms of excuses for not seeking physical contact with the women I thought society had taught me to say I loved.

The more intense the understanding that I was in love, the more I dedicated thought cycles to formal groups of words like these.

I have grown older, if not wiser.

The return on my investment in writing book-length love letters…well, only once did I get anything for it — I have been married to my childhood penpal for over 27 years now.

Otherwise, the law of diminishing returns tells me that I probably don’t have another book to finish, even if that book was about the very fate/future of Earth-based lifeforms on extraterrestrial celestial bodies.

Why?

Because to complete the book, I’d need to be around people again.

To be around people again, I’d need something to calm my nerves.

To calm my nerves, I have, for the most part, consumed alcoholic beverages.

I no longer like the effect that alcoholic beverages have on my body, regardless of whether I’ll live another day or another century, effects like dizziness, depression and [imagined] swelling of the kidneys.

I generally withdrew from online social media sites because I was no longer interested in the like/plus/chat/comment format of social engagement.

To be honest, online social media was always only an ego-boosting game to me.

I have been ready to die for a long time now, going on almost 45 years, and, in preparation, I want to concentrate on what my last thought will be as I lose consciousness.

Here and now, I focus on what I want to think, not on what I am reacting to in polite conversations.

I have had enough social media validation to last a lifetime.

I am at peace with myself when I’m standing alone, looking up into the treetops, listening to the wind, birds and insects in a spontaneous, extemporaneous, symphony of sets of states of energy in the most natural form of dancing that exists.

As Earth turns away from the light of the Sun and darkness indicates less UV radiation and photons in the space around me, I pause to think of anything else to write today before I post this blog entry and go outside to turn off the water spigot which, through a rubber hose, hydrated the plants at the front of the yard because not enough rain fell to moisten the soil for our curbside flower garden.

If I had my druthers, I’d fall asleep tonight and never wake up again, today being a good day and no days in the future promising more than the peace and quiet I’ve enjoyed during the ten hours I’ve been up and about.

However, I’ll probably wake up tomorrow and have to figure out something to do because I posted my weekly meditation blog entry on a Saturday, not a Sunday.

Such is life.