#234

Every living thing was born to suffer and feel alien among its fellows. I believe even the ant and bee, even the branch on the tree and the leaf on the branch, are as my left hand and my right hand: even if joined in a oneness, cleaved from the whole. This is just one of the paradoxes of existence which torture us all, and ought to make us more tender towards one another in understanding of our shared pain. We have many more in common, each of us, no matter who or when or where or what. 

We were born to scar and smash and bloody our hands, chipping our fingernails in the scrabbling to hold on to our lives. Some rare few of us claim to have consented to and chosen their bodies and circumstances before birth, but the great mass of us did not ask to be born, or do not remember doing so, and at any rate the world is not ideal, often too painful to remain fully sane in, and we are never truly as good as we want to be. We have to lie to ourselves about so much just to get through being awake, nightmares may plague our sleep, the great roaring unknown of death may remind us every day that it awaits us, our fleeting pleasures sadly outnumbered by our griefs and ailments. There is no guarantee that our greatest loves and hopes and triumphs will not turn to dross, if not through the corrosion of time, then disintegrating rapidly before our very eyes. Even the things we choose to ignore, to disbelieve, the things we try to avoid and the things we took precautions against can reverse all our fortunes and kill us where we stand, and we have no guarantees about the hereafter save educated guesses and titanic acts of faith. This is true, best as I can tell, for practically everyone you might meet. 

So I was thinking we could stand to cut each other a lot more slack than we tend to. All of us being guilty before one another and all that. All of us just storm-tossed little boats on the same infinite ocean, beautiful and terrible.

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But also I just want everyone out of my face, pretty much.

Goodwill only for my fellow human. But it's not the season for conversations with me. A dude needs to eat all the silence he can snatch to himself sometimes.

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The world, by the way, is noisier than ever. Is the internet a new Tower of Babel? Will our tongues, tied together in this spiderweb, soon be sundered once more by catastrophe and collapse? I don't care! I don't want to have a fight about it!

--JL