Sometimes l like to detach from my physical self, to stimulate an out-of-body experience, so to speak, so that I may view my life much as a biographer would. This exercise helps me to analyze all that I do and determine whether or not I am on course to accomplishing my goals.

Such an exercise can be enlightening, but is only advised for those who can handle the realization that life is nothing more than a series of big dreams caged by a somber reality. That being said, the best of us can use this exercise to motivate, refocus energies, be proactive and ultimately get something accomplished. The rest of us, by which I mean most of us, will simply spend more time on the couch, depressed by our futility, watching reality TV reruns and wishing our life could be half as successful as the contestants on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Below are sample excerpts from my biography, written by my detached self, who operates as a sole entity, completely independent of me:

December 2, 2007

It’s 5:15 AM, and Keith Hemstreet is awake. Seated in a chair in his living room, he stares out the window into the darkness. His face holds the grimace of a man trying to apply a complex mathematical equation to some abstract life notion in an effort to give some order to the random variability of daily occurrences. In reality, he is wondering why he is awake and sitting in this chair so damn early in the morning.

December 4, 2007

At day’s end, Hemstreet takes a minute to reflect. “Did I make a contribution to the world on some significant level?” he asks himself. Surprisingly, the answer is “yes.” Just after sundown, in single digit temperatures, he walked 100 yards to the community recycle center to dump a plastic milk jug. It’s likely that history books will not mention this deed.

December 7, 2007

Once the children are in bed, Hemstreet steps to his bookshelf. On the shelves, a growing library, easily his most prized material possession. Scanning the spines of numerous literary classics, a few of which he has actually read, he takes Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” in his hand. A boarding pass at page 256 still marks his last attempt. He had powered through a quarter of the book just after graduating from college, but abandoned it because he was still young, and thus figured he would revisit the book after maturing a bit. Once he cared enough to take a stab at changing the world. At 22, he just didn’t give a shit.

Three pages into the book, Hemstreet realizes he’s bitten off more than he can chew. The day has worn him thin, and reading will only put him to sleep. He re-shelves the book and moves slowly across the room to his file cabinet, opens the drawer and removes a folder labeled, “Walk Across Iceland.” Inside the folder are road maps, travel info from the Icelandic Board of Tourism, photographs, and catalogs filled with the latest camping gear. At some point in the future, Hemstreet plans to walk across Iceland from the eastern shores to the capital city of Reykjavik in the southwest. He figures a walk of this distance, and the accompanying solitude, will enable him to achieve balance. Upon his return, he will sit down at a simple desk, surrounded by his family, and write his magnum opus, tentatively titled, “The Superficial Transparency of Everything.” However, odds are this will never happen.

December 9, 2007

Seated on the couch, strumming Nirvana’s “Polly” on the guitar, the only song he knows how to play, Hemstreet has an idea.

“I think I’m going to write a book of poetry,” he says to his wife.

“About what?” she asks.

“Anything. The way the dust swirls around our apartment in the afternoon light. My out-of-tune guitar. The icicles that hang from the roof. Our daughters stomping around in their bare feet. You know, the little vignettes of life.”

“What about your novel?” she asks. “You’re 35,000 words into it. Focus your energy and get it done.”

“I’ll get back on the novel when inspiration strikes. Right now I don’t have time to undertake a project as big as a novel. Poems are much more conducive to my schedule. They’re short. I can knock one out on the bus to work or during a meeting. In a year’s time, I’ll have 150 poems to my name. That’s a book. Besides, I’ve always wanted to be a poet. I just like the sound of it.”

“Sounds great,” she says, knowing this, too, will likely never happen.

He is a man who embarks on a new project every week, abandoning the previous week’s project as unworthy. Maybe, after his death, his wife will be able to convince a publisher to print, “The Collected Half-Works of Keith Hemstreet,” thus attaining him posthumous literary fame, a highly desirable and eternally rewarding accomplishment.