In response to November 5th, 2013:

I am the romanticizer, the unenviable fool. I am a manipulator of words. I turn several years of running away from my problems and write a book about it, glorifying it into an admirable form of ‘roaming’ and ‘wandering.’ I romanticize my gloomy, smug, withdrawn nature as intellectualism and progress. I idealize my lifestyle of work and creation; a prideful and pretentious idolatry. I am likely the only one that strains to see through it all.

What all who serve an idol fear is death, what Paul calls, “the last enemy.” It is fear of eventual obliteration. It is the fear that death, like life, means nothing. It is a fear we rarely name but which hovers over us. The compulsiveness that drives us to consume too much, drink too much, take drugs or work too hard are bred from this fear of death, the fear that we will no longer exist, the fear that no matter what we do or say or accomplish our life will be meaningless, an insignificant blip on the screen.

-Hedges, Losing Moses on the Freeway, Chapter 2, p51