I'm losing this battle against the status quo. But I won't do August again. No dramatics. The sun's going down sooner each day, and I can't bear another Winter. I can't bear Daylight Savings ending. I can't bear another "holiday season". I don't know what will happen. I don't know what I will do.

After that month-long run of reading, I'm trying to strip away the religious trappings to find what I think is real to me. It's hard to distinguish what's real and what was imagination, especially when it was something I thought I understood and accepted. It makes me feel sorta "atheist", taking the concepts and mechanics and then removing the religious and faith components. It's sort of empty, and not liking that, it makes me think I'm more "Buddhist" than I like to let on.

I consider my family. It's good. My parents did a good a job as possible is my final analysis. But it doesn't change whatever I do about myself. I still consider it unthinkable that my parents die before me. It just resonates that way.

They say when you die, your life "flashes" before your eyes. I'm thinking that time ceases to exist when you die. Time is a function of perception, created by the functions of the physical brain. Consciousness may continue for a bit, but since time has stopped, who is to say "how long" it takes for consciousness to dissolve through the betweens, as described in the Tibetan Book of blah, blah, blah.

When I die and my life flashes before my eyes, I want to see it from an outside perspective, mostly from above, continuous from birth like a film being fast-forwarded, like Koyaanisqatsi, with an emphasis on the passage of each day with the sun rising and setting. Each day will be like a minute in relative "real time", and I can trace the path my life took me day by day.

In real time, that would take six hours and five minutes for each year. Four years would take a day. My life to date would take more than 8 and a half days. I think. I suck at math. Get off my back.

It will be interesting to trace my formative years that I have no recollection of. See everything from an outside point of view, every day, everywhere I went, everything I did, everyone I met, everyone I knew, everyone I loved, ships passing in the night, sparks, collisions, sunrise, sunset, seasons changing, growing up, growing bigger, progressing, changing, learning, developing, my ghost travelling.

I had a good life. It is interesting to me. It doesn't matter when it ends. I had a blast.