Morning in America

A new day has dawned and here I am, still alive. One more night has passed without me dying in my sleep, for which I am grateful. If you think that's a gruesome thought and that I'm so screwed up to think such things, consider this:
     
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep, 
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Ha! That's an 18th century children's bedtime prayer I learned as a toddler, and it has totally fucked me up for life. There is hardly a night that I don't think of that as I'm climbing into bed. (Thanks for that, Mom and Dad.)

Moving on, I'm back at my blog today, even though yesterday I had a failure of the spirit and felt it was a meaningless pursuit and nobody cared anyway and it was a total waste of time, blah, blah, blah. But then I heard from a few folks that it was something they actually looked forward to reading every day, and that cheered me up enormously. I also heard from my other self, loud and clear, and she said that it's just about the best thing she does every day. So here's another one.

After all, if I'm not going to make myself happy, what the heck am I doing here? If each of us worked hard at satisfying our core needs instead of doing what is expected, what other people want us to do, or what we think we should do in order to live well, there would be less strife, no war, and certainly none of those crazies you see on the news in those Middle Eastern countries, running around in flip-flops throwing rocks and bottles and bombs at embassies or setting fire to themselves. (There would also be no interior decorators, but that's another blog post entirely.)