Wanting Is Half The Getting

(The most excellent photograph is from: Daily Dose of Imagery. Visit them.)

I think that I like the average person more than your average person does. But I am not like most people.

I don’t know what to want. Most people know what they want. Many are a bundle of wants, and ratchet the most optional things up to “needs” from “wants.” There are a multitude of things that I see people ready to debase or impoverish themselves for that I wouldn’t cross the street to participate in if they were free.

I could list quite a few things many sane persons would like and enjoy that would be a prison sentence for me. That’s boring and cranky and I won’t do it. I’m not sure what makes me so strange. I do know that the average person wants to hear “Sweet Home Alabama,” coming through a tinny speaker on the gasoline dispenser while they’re filling their tank much more than I do. By “more,” I really mean “at all.” Que sera.

The crabbiest people with the narrowest worldview always think everyone should be like them. I think the world would be a drearier place if everyone was like me. Then again, if uniformity is required, then the everyone should be exactly like me. It’s the only way I’ll be happy. I’d dearly like to be left alone to be as strange as I am, though, and you nice people go about your business.

I’m grateful to be alive, and still in the game. There are not enough hours in the day to suit me. If I could live to be a thousand years old, I’d be perfectly content to spend every single one of those days in my house with my family.

But I saw that picture. I once walked out a door on the left side of that picture from that “Office” and dodged around the peddlers on the stone flags, dazed by the sudden rush of sunlight, what is now a long time ago. I was holding my wife’s hand.

I want to go and stand on the disc in the middle of the square over there, where they burned Savonarola. It seems like the place to be, for a person like me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it again. But I know that I’d like to.

I’m halfway there.