I find myself asking, why write? One effect seemingly derived from the pervasiveness of information in this, the information age, is a feeling that, whatever it is, it must have been said before. School is no help in this regard. Nor is the increasing predictability of social situations.

While walking at the university today I passed a fellow student talking, rather loudly, on her phone. The part of the conversation I heard amounted to "why do these weird things happen to me, they don't happen to normal people!" Had I a dime for every utterance of this or a similar phrase throughout the world and history...

So again, as I walk home, I question myself: what can I say that has not been said, perhaps not in so many words, already? While it seems I know the answer deep inside, I find it difficult to part with the worldly abstractions pressed upon our consciousness. Perhaps then, I can gain some comfort by limiting my discourse to that which is of some importance.

Yet this is a rather strange criterion. How many of us can claim to define important in a completely non-relativistic manner? Indeed I think task impossible in its purest sense, yet once again I find it rather unsuitable to lose this concept to eternal wordlessness. I must, it seems, choose my final judgment as, after all, a judgment.

If I can say but only 'interesting' of a topic, then I have given it nary a thought worth floating upon the consciousness of our collective soul. This was my conclusion, tentative as it may be, which establishes purpose in my writing.

I close with a poem, also composed on my trek home:

The stray stone feels not
the force with which it is kicked
and yet
loudly the echoes ripple, through the world