by David T. Warren

As the years slip by and I try to
align each day with the passing of
my life, I find myself on tenuous
ground. After forty years of living,
dreaming, and working to build the
kind of community that I would like
to live in, I find myself faced with
the reality of how little I’ve done to
accomplish this task. I haven’t tried.
I am accompanied into the future
with the lessons learned by my daily
attendance in the school of hard
sox.

Though reality has popped
my balloon, I arrive at this point in
time with the buoyancy to find a
better way to live the remainder of
my life than the way I’ve been doing
it. Apparently life offers no stable,
secure, rounded fulfillment.

Life at best is for me an untidy mess
of unfinished business, broken
achievements, personal failures, half-successes, short-lived triumphs,
belated insights, noble desires, and
shameful deeds.

Hopefully, through
the years I have accumulated a
little wisdom; but for me life is
incomplete and much potential
remains; it eludes my mortal
grasp. Life as an ongoing state has
controlled me more than I it. Like
most people, I’ve had my moments
of breathtaking perfection, but no
permanent achievement seems
possible. This may be because as a
human being I am only part of an
evolutionary process whose task it is
to till the soil, learn the rules, build
the technology, and make ready for
the people of the future, where necessity will require that basic human needs and wants be provided for by the collective of the community, and individuals will be set free from hampering emotions of jealousy, fear, and rivalry.

The fact that people will also lose their ability to hate, love, have hope, or be generous will have little effect on the world of the future that will operate with ant like perfection into the millennia. Provided of course, that we don’t blow ourselves off the face of the earth or drown in the slime of increased pollution in the interim. For me, these alternatives are grim and bleak and leave so much to be desired that I’ve decided to become a
charter member in the San Francisco Suicide Club.
The only requirements are that I put my affairs in order, stop looking for satisfaction on a tomorrow that may never come, and live each day as though it were my last. 13 With this commitment, I bequeath half of my worldly belongings to the club’s trinary garage sale; these funds

go to support the club’s bizarre activities. Going places I’ve never been and doing things I’ve never done. Maybe I’ll see you there!