"Someday, my father will die, and I shall take his place"

As I grow older, I find myself incresingly less content with life in general. I don't know exactly why this is - I've achieved pretty much every goal I'd set out for myself by this age - but the fact remains that I'm just getting bored of it. I mean, yes, there is satisfaction in saying "I want to make $200,000 (in total) by the time I'm 25, and being able to say you have definately achived that goal, along with other social and self-satisfying things, but it's just really not enough to make setting more goals seem completely worth the effort. I find it odd that in highschool, if you have a lousy time of it (not really speaking for myself, I really enjoyed most of my highschool years despite hating most of the people I know and the highschool itself), you're told that "things get better", and that this is universally accepted.

Things don't really seems to change that much, and I'm pretty sure a great many people would agree with me. Nearly everyone I still know that I went to highschool with are still fundamentally the same people doing the same things, just in different places and so forth.

Let's do an analog here:

Life is like driving through Montana. It's a very pretty place at the start, when you first cross in from Canada and see the deserts and big sky, the hoodoos, the antelope, and the sunset in your rearview mirror. You first night smoking a joint, serenaded by the wildlife and looking at the sky from under a massive willow tree is like nothing else, and you really feel like the galaxy is at a standstill for a few moments.

Then, after camping in and passing through the wildlands, as you start to run into society and civilization, you start to realize that the beauty of the place, at least for the people who live here, is just a lie. You pass by a thousand signs with anti-meth slogans, a lame attempt to halt the spread of death amongst a poor people. You pass crumbling tin shacks with toys all over the lawn, sunken mines and abandonded factories, and miles of dirt and discomfort. Your place under a beautiful sky is replaced by a dumpster behind a packed campground toilet, looking out on a smog-covered tralier park, and your wildlife is replaced by crying babies and traffic.

Just when you get sick enough of this to want to end your roadtrip and just go home, bam! You're back in the desert, looking at beautiful formations in the rocks, herds of buffalo crossing the road, and finally, you're in the Black Hills, which is possibly the closest place to celestial in North America.

All the while, you meet people, some nice, some not, and you get to see alot of things. But next time, wouldn't you skip the middle, and just take the shortcut to South Dakota?



This is really a thouroughly depressing topic, and I don't feel like writing anymore.