Today, I am tired and shivering, running multiparallel emotional issues, managing a storyline and keeping my own life choices on track.

I cannot talk with one or a few people with whom support would greatly help because my life choices involve them and I’m not sure the effect I’ll have on them.

No one is happy all the time but I still hate to cause someone’s suffering.

I consciously chose the life of an artist, a performer, at age 10 in 5th grade, when my best friend and love of my life died — life stopped mattering as anything serious but I acted like it did even though I was dead inside.

Or if not dead, then an apathetic jumble of nonsense.

After a while the acting became me.

I don’t want to think but I have plans to work out in a timely manner.

Mentally, I’ve shredded my thoughts on a moment by moment basis to prevent pain from carrying forward, my pain and the pain of others.

If I have no one to talk to/with, I still want to talk and here is the place I put the words I think and want to say.

Decades ago, in my late 20s, I met with psychologists and psychiatrists per advice from older mentors.

I can sum up their observations in a single phrase (which oddly enough echoed the problems I had with my parents saying the same thing): “You think too much.  You just have to decide you want to live.”

In my youth, my parents punished me for living the way I wanted to live so I developed my mental muscles, exercising elaborate thought trails to entertain myself internally, thus thinking too much.

I would like to be a parent to see if I can give a child the open, loving relationship that I dreamt of having as a kid, allowing the child to pursue the child’s dreams, rather than living out any unfulfilled dreams of my own (note the contradiction).

Childrearing experts I read about in my parents’ childrearing literature said that children want their parents/guardians to set strict, easy-to-understand parameters so that the child becomes a responsible adult one day.

Much of that literature was written or was influenced by 1950s culture — post-WWII, Cold War, anti-communist McCarthy era kind of stuff.

Growing up in the 1960s, I was marginally influenced by the counterculture movement, coming of age in the 1970s.

My parents accused me of being antiestablishment and that I would have joined the protest marches had I been born a decade earlier.

Antiestablishment? Me, the Eagle Boy Scout? Me, who sang in a wholesome church-sponsored group called Sing Out Kingsport, a spinoff of Up With People?

I don’t march in crowds.

I’m an independent person, free to be inconsistent in my philosophy because life is short and any systematic dogma that might churn out of my producing a set of easy life lessons to follow after my death is irrelevant to a dead me.

There is a trap that many of us fall into and that is the trap of becoming an influential member of a [sub]culture.

I know what it’s like to be a leader, to be a person whom others thank for making them better persons.

We are social animals and we tend to form hierarchical societies.

I believe the cyclical pattern of wave after wave of leaders, followers, influencers, black swans, outliers, etc., is a dead end.

As an actor, I know when we’re faking it to make it.

That’s why I’ve avoided the leadership track, jumping off as I was succeeding quite well — I saw the fallacy.  I was falling into the trap and got out before it closed me in.

With 8+ billion of us, the numbers growing, we can change but it is a long, long process, a process I don’t want anyone’s name or dogma tied to — it has to be invisible yet transparent if the point of change is to reduce and eventually eliminate the dependence on social hierarchy.

Every one of us has to be involved as equally as possible in making these changes, each with their own understanding and expertise.

What of the billions who are used to and want to continue the hierarchical structure, those who have personally benefited from their Influencer and Leadership positions, some for many, many generations, amassing great armies and/or the equivalent of billions of US dollars?

I am alive for a short time period, my time on Earth growing shorter and shorter as I make unwise decisions with my health like standing unprotected under the damaging UV rays of the local star, our Sun, or eating unrecognisable goo we call processed food, filled with chemical concoctions that may or may not be beneficial to my health.

I am unimportant.

My name is unimportant (although I love seeing my name and my words in print).

How shall I live the rest of my life?

How shall I act the rest of my life?

Today, I have no answers.

I meditate upon the questions.

How do I demonstrate to myself and the rest of our species what I am thinking?