The Ultimate Goal

Someone asked me about my blog today. They asked: “What’s your ultimate goal with it?” And it’s a good question. Because I’m a word person and a totally shameless Gogol Bordello fan, the world “ultimate” is what stuck out to me (the title of one of their most, well, ultimate songs). I gave the person a very short, admittedly insincere reply. Not a lie, just an I-can’t-explain-it-really answer. Half-embarrassed that I didn’t really know. And half-resistant to saying what was true since what is true isn’t really a goal so much as a whole bunch of stuff I don't know yet and can't explain.

The real answer would have been to blast this:



Or play this:



Or read the last several lines of Maurice Manning’s poem “Three Truths and One Story”: "There are words and there are deeds, and both/are dying out, dying away/from where they were and what they meant./God save the man who has the heart/to think of anything more sad."

Once, when I was very young, I had to walk the final bottom stretch of El Caminito Road to get to school. Something had happened with a ride, and to wait would have meant being late. So someone’s mother directed me down the road. “Just walk. And watch for cars.” It was a short stretch. But I was small and there was no sidewalk, just a big intimidating fence to my left that lined our town’s private airstrip. On that walk, I became very aware of the sound of my feet in the dirt. The crunching of my sneakers. And then I became very aware that I was aware. And I began to think about death, as I often did, and about infinite which usually scared me, but didn’t on this particular morning, and I thought about what I would be like when I was old, very very old, and I saw myself there. Old me. And young, small me was filled with a certainty that my life was going to be somehow extraordinary. I didn’t have those words then, but I knew.

In other words, the ultimate goal is, y’know, that.

All of it.