Many things die like this. Billions of fantastic paragraphs written by the most brilliant minds, the least brilliand minds, and the most mediocre minds waft away like ashed from a burned diary page. Trillions of guitar riffs (most of which are shite or have been heard before, admittedly) disappear into the misty haze of drug-disabled memory (or just sleep-addled silliness). Quadrillions - no, Quintillions - of meaningful sayings are lost, sucked into the vacuum of the moment's profound introspection, yet recklessly destroyed upon entrance to the spinning singularity that is the very heart of the human existence: the single thread of time that binds us, restricts us, and slowly strangles us.

Time chokes off our greatest efforts. No difference a man has made may be remembered eternally; take for example some slight of hand and really advanced thought a few thousand years ago done by a man named Yohevus. His followers are amazed and tell stories of him for ages after, but his true efforts are corrupted by tall tales told throughout history, until he becomes Jeusius, then Jesus, then one day becomes Hezod, then Heinzerr, then whatever else. His efforts are lost as time begins to forget him, and after several revolutions of the cosmic clock, he is lost forever to the kitschy quaintness of yesteryear, like when those stupid people used to live in smelly caves (which they fought over just as much as the artificial caves we create for ourselves these days).

Time is infinite, and it draws it's fuel from the finite. To be immortal, one must feed off the lives of the mortal, because death is as much a part of life as all that 'living' people insist on doing. 'Living' becomes merely a means of distracting one's self from the truth - everyone is going to die, and the only way to keep from going mad is to accept it or busy yourself enough to ignore it.

You don't really matter. Nothing you do will ever really matter. Nothing anyone you know does will do anything that really matters, in the grand scheme of things. This is because time is always feeding off of us.

What else can be done? We glorify this temporary nature, or we devote our lives to subvert this insurmountable foe. No one can defeat time - the efforts we have made so far are feeble. Time is the raging torrent of the eternity of years, while we are all riding on a planetary boat that is but a mere grain of sand submerged in the torrent.

Sand doesn't defend itself much. Against it's better efforts, it is always subject to whatever forces act upon it. This is all it can be.

But not everything is useless.

Everything we do matters HERE.

Everyone we touch feels it HERE.

Everything we kill dies HERE.

The cosmos may be indifferent to the troubles suffered by insignificant specks living on one of the grains of sand between it's toes, but everyone suffering with us is vulnerable to everything we do. Remember - the grain of sand is vulnerable to everything that is acted upon it, including it's own petty internal struggles.

We cannot easily see the struggles on the grain of sand, but they exist, and they are larger than life for those living on the grain of sand.

Nothing really matters, but everything matters, really.

To live is to accept the duality of life, in that once one is alive, one must eventually not be alive, swallowed in the current of time and devoured to sustain the great beast. All we can do in the meantime is throw life preservers to those caught in the current and tie ourselves together. We're all going over the waterfall, but we might as well go together - if only because we're all in this together, and there is nothing we can do to escape this fate.

~AYRN