There has to be something out there, right?

I mean something other than a distraction or dogma or degradation. Something that actually grips the bottom of your soul and drags you along with it until there is nothing left but the feeling of accomplishment and well being. The feeling of being alive.

I've been noticing lately that everything is just another chunk of time that leads to another chunk and nothing is ever what I really want. Nothing ever really makes me feel better about anything, much less myself and what I'm doing.

I would say that everything is just a means to an end, but the end isn't really an end. And most of the time that end isn't really anything at all. It's just the time when whatever it is you were doing stopped. And then something else started--maybe.

We're coming up on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11th. At the time, and probably for the first four months or so after it happened, this event was described as the defining moment for an entire generation. Something that made the kids feel something real for the first time.

And when there isn't anything meaningful going on and suddenly the easy ebb and flow of life is interrupted for a second, well, yeah, I guess you could call that a defining moment. But think about that. This moment, while affecting the entire world, really only directly hurt people in New York, Washington D.C., parts of Pennsylvania and the families of the victims (which, to be sure, hit every state in the nation).

What it really defined was the lives of the people it didn't directly affect. It exposed the shallowness of modern life. So now, we complain of long lines at the airport, and how getting searched makes us feel. Hardly anyone talks about moving to New York anymore. But everyone feels that there's got to be something, somewhere, somehow that is better than what they're doing now.

But there really isn't.

It's all the same. All the time. Everywhere. There may be a hundred and fifty channels on cable, but there's nothing new under the sun. And we've been baking under this sun forever. I think we may be cooked.

I was talking to a friend earlier this week, and she was frustrated, too. In a way, maybe we were trying to figure out why drinking and doing nothing was better than not drinking and doing nothing. At least there's still a bottom of the bottle to get to.

But she used to draw all the time. Different things I'm sure (I've never seen her work, so I don't know), but she used to always be drawing. When she was unemployed earlier this year for about a month or two, she thought it would be the perfect time to get back to art. But nothing ever came. No inspiration. Nothing means that much anymore.

So we drink our beer and wonder where all the great ideas went. It doesn't make us feel better, it just makes things a little nicer knowing that someone else thinks like this. It gives us a toast so we can clink the bottles together.

The mechanics of life have overridden the actual life. The things we feel we have to do have gotten in the way of things we like to do. So much that we don't even know how to do the stuff we like to do anymore. It's too much of a hassle. There are too many obstacles. There is no sense of adventure, or places to adventure to.

Suddenly I'm reminded of Happy Harry Hard-on in the movie Pump Up The Volume. Which, in its time, was a huge inspiration for me to get off my ass and do something. Now it's nostalgia, even though it still resonates (well, other than the whole high school test score thing). Nothing moves me the same way it did.

Falling in love, it's not the same anymore. Yeah, it's a nice high, but even before the high has finished its upward movement, I already see the end. The badness. The things that could go wrong, making the love mean less--almost as a defense mechanism. Making it almost just a like. And I like a lot of people. So what's the difference?

Matt Worley is looking for someone to show him the difference between like and love again.