Nobody is going to read this. If this were a book it would be the most badly organised book you ever read. I have no plan, no aim, no objective, no overarching strategy. I have an end, I suppose, and a vague impulse that I should write down what I can in the time remaining. Intention is too strong a word, it's more that - I don't know - I have to do something, so it might as well be this.


Then there is the immortality thing. We want to hang on as long as we can and preferably quite a bit longer. I am such an important individual that the world and its generations to come deserve more of me than one measly human lifespan can provide. That was a joke, by the way. Irony. That's the way I am. You'll get used to it. I know I have.


Suppose the time remaining is very short - even shorter than I imagine? The aneurysm, the cataclysm, myocardial infarction, the juddering of tectonic plates, food poisoning, asteroidal trajectory, the moving finger, the moving vehicle, the stroke can strike at any moment, as of course they do. Ha-ha. Cheer up. But anyway... suppose.


Then, in the time remaining I should say what's most important. 


People. 


People are more important than things. Though things may last for longer. People are more important than ideas. Though ideas may last millennia, building and destroying civilisations as they provoke actions and reactions in a chain of change that-- you know what I mean. Because ideas come from people. People are important because they may have ideas, although so very few do. Or because they may enact those ideas, even if the ideas are bad. 


Is this what I believe? When I stop and poke at it I find that it's not as clear as when it was swilling around in my brain. These thoughts become more spectral when you put them in black and white. I don't believe in God. Or gods. I mistrust religion. My atheism approaches the evangelical. I thought I was agnostic once: not that I did not know that there was a god, but that we could not know. Now I seem to believe that we must not know. That we'll get along better if we put our faith in ourselves instead of some outside agency. I used to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure...


Anyway, I love you.


Now that's got that out of the way.