He felt as if he had leaned so hard into life he had gone completely around, only to land upright, dizzy and a bit confused. The tumble had been so quick, so disorienting, that he seemed to have suddenly popped into existence, seated right here in this diner, with a fully realized but unlived past. He recalled only bits and pieces of it, random snapshots or gifs, no audio, and not always in chronologic order. He wasn't even sure they were all... real. He couldn't tell if the memories were happy or sad, some disppointing, though there was a fond funny one. There was no theme, they seemed randomly collected. He chuckled even now thinking of the funny one, only to feel the ping of remorse remembering a disappointing one. He also felt hard ridden and put away wet for the remembering.

He sighed, took a sip of coffee realizing it had grown a bit cold and put it down with a hint of attitude. then gave it a push as if to tell it to fuck off, coming to a clinking stop against the plate with the remnants of pie. "I do like pie," he thought with a agreeable smirk. He didn't need something harder, he was already free floating mentally. Liquor would just make it hard to walk and more likely he'd piss himself. He leaned back hard into the seat and slumped with a sigh, adjusting his fedora to air out his forehead, realizing he hadn't taken it off, and stared at the piercing light overhead spotlight wanting the temproary blindness to isolate him from his thoughts.  

He could tell you his story; where he was born, grew up, and with some accuracy where he'd been and when he'd been there. But if he was being honest, he really didn't remember much of what had happened, though almost all of it was working. He kinda felt like he had wasted his life. He existed to work. He wasn't brain damaged, he didn't have memory loss. He had never been that interested in whatever was happening, though in the moment he might have seemed to be. ADHD. Maybe he had that. That could do that... you live a life you aren't really ever present for. For a man his age he didn't feel he had many memories. A random thought interrupts, "apparently not too old to work, lord knows, that retirement age was more of a carrot on a stick. Rich men in Washington keeping the loot for themselves and their friends, were sure to keep making it so the old and tired could keep them rich before they would get something for nothing."  There just never seemed to be enough money to put something away, it all went to what life was left when he wasn't working. He stared at the coffee, lowering his standards a bit and thinking maybe it wasn't all that cold.

He wasn't the one who could tell you who he was, not sure he quite knew what that even meant. Point of fact, there really wasn't anyone who knew him very well at all. For a moment he felt kinda lonely for that. Sure, his wife had been with him over 30 years, she could describe his outward demeanor, chonkly cut figure, what he liked and what annoyed him, but she didn't really know him, and wasn't really interested enough to ask. And he didn't care enough to tell her, and if he did, he didn't know what he would say. This felt a bit odd. He had no idea what his kids thought of him, nor people who "knew" him. He didn't share much, they didn't ask. Everyone just... worked, and lived there own lives. He wondered if this meant he didn't really exist after all? Was this going to turn into some "Its a Wonderful Life" montage, where he was shown a world without him? Meh... the world had pretty much been without him as it was. All. He. Did. Was. Work. Even his few hobbies felt like work. He had no close friends, didn't feel he had the energy that seemed to need poured into it, and he preferred being alone. Mostly. What would change? This line of thinking seemed despondent, he thought, but he didn't feel depsondent. A little anxious, because he always was a little anxious for feeling a bit vulnerable at every turn, but not depsondent. He didn't dwell long enough in introspection to be despondent, just these moments. He decided he himself did not know himself well. He wasn't interested enough to give it much more thought.

He got the waitresse's eye with a nod and a gesture, she moved the keys on the register, there was zipping of the mirco-printer, then she brought the receipt over, to which he added his card with a quick smile without it leaving her hand. With a smile she nodded and went back to the register, and he began pushing the coffee cup around without any sense of purpose. She came back and seeming not to want to enter his thoughtful space as a courtesy, slid the reciept and card over. He didn't even look at it, tipped well, signed it and put the coffee cup on top of it, slipping the card back into his wallet in a mindless movement, not even able to recall he had done so. As he stood she offered a kind "Good night!" and he smiled and nodded, gathered up his coat throwing it on in one swift motion, all while walking to the door and making his way out into the cold air of a crisp late fall evening.

The bullet hit him square in the chest.

Loneliness

It was in that moment that he realized
that when he needed love, comfort and support
all that was ever offered was disdain.

Insignificant Significance

 

In a way, it was inevitable.

The single room held all the vestiges of a life lived, perhaps not well, but not badly. It did not end here, no, it ended in a sterile, utilitarian room on the other side of the city, where everyone went to die, because “life at all costs” really meant “profit over humanity”.  They told themselves stories that made them feel good, justifying their inhumanity, excusing it, giving it false righteousness.  No, he wasn’t allowed to die with that humanity, but made to die alone, away from the parts and pieces of a life he had lived in earnest, for there was profit in his death, a perceived morality, and others felt his living more important than his life.. Not surrounded by the people, the stories, the accumulation of dust between the chapters. But that wasn’t really the worst part.

One life, an infinitesimally insignificant instant in the fullness of time and space, hidden away at the edge of a galaxy in an unimaginably large universe. Literally inconceivably large. Even out it the open here, laid bare, it was really no more significant to be alive than to be an electron around a hydrogen atom, which mattered more that the sum of its kind. For its time, for its assembled molecules, it was however, significant. It matted to itself because it became conscious of itself. It mattered to others like it. So life is relative then. It entirely depends on perspective. Even to others like it, even those not like it, same time, same space, may never meet and to one another bear no effect on one another, never know the other even existed, or yet, a small action taken ripples across the life of the other with or without attribution changing its story. Everything matters. Nothing matters. Its all relative. But for this life, this random not random collection of molecules that became conscious and made decisions moving it through time and space, creating ripples by thoughts, actions, it was all here in this one room. Already it was forgotten, the man dead now across town, disconnected from these, these stories within objects devoid of meaning for the context was gone. So too, the dissembling molecules that once bore a consciousness, was without context, disconnected as it was from its stories, its dusty intervaling insignificant significances. Relatively speaking, in the fullness of time, it never mattered but to the others adjacent to it. And even then, ripples fade, replaced, combined and intermingled, with other significant and insignificant ripples, and eventually forgotten, or its insignificance made manifest as a line in a forgotten and no longer extant tome, if it ever even rose to that level. Life, one’s life, is insignificant in the full scheme of things, but it matters to those who have it, to those who are touched by the ripples that life created. But only for their time.

And so then, the moments, dreams, machinations, contests, trials and tribulations, so intense for the rewards though meaningless in the full scheme of things, seemed important in their time. Relativity being what it is, they were likely given more value to those who bore witness and none by those who did not and were unaffected, but really, did that matter? A relative question, to be sure.

Gideon wondered. Why did power over others matter to those who sought and evolved it to control others? To what purpose? What divided good, from evil, both large and small versions? Why had their collection of molecules that became conscious feel the need to have control over others, to take away or damage that one and only instant in time they existed in? The stakes were nil for them in reality, but they did not see it that way. It was penultimate for their victims for it changed their experience, darkening it. Why would one consciousness want that for another knowing how they themselves hated it? He sat quietly for a moment, and his thoughts focused on the sounds that came to him now that he left his thoughts to become present, to hear the juxtaposition of the peeper in the woods and the airplane in the sky, the car on the road, the man opening a soda can with a snap and a hiss. Ordinary sounds. Insignificant other than that they existed and then they didn’t, and would never again. He smiled with the thought that his was the only consciousness that heard all of these uniquely at this moment in the entirety of existence, and that this should mean something. It didn’t. And that irony made him smile.

The man, elderly, a burden to no one, a friend to a few, died over a cup of coffee. Alone in his room, late at night, his collection of molecules that had become a consciousness wanted a nice cup of coffee, and a moments companionship with the bodega clerk, Clemente, and left his life’s collection, to go get a cheap, meaningless moment of happiness. He died because another collection of molecules with consciousness shot him because he got in the way of whatever it was that motivated it to control and take away things from another collection of molecules with consciousness. The old man’s last words to the gun wielding collection of molecules with consciousness was, “Why? Why do you want to do this?” Clemente knew the old man by sight and his first, to Clemente his only sound, cried in sudden agony when the old man fell as he did, so saving Clemente as the gun wielding taker of life then fled. The old man died for no other reason than he was there between thief and victim, and felt he should help Clemente, a group of molecules with a consciousness that gave him sundries and a moments companionship. The other’s answer was as silent and meaningless as the bullet that entered the old man’s brain, disassembling his consciousness, but not killing him outright. That would come later, in that sterile utilitarian room across the city, where he died alone without the things that told them who he was, had been, the sounds to which he responded to as him, those things in that room that would not be discovered for a couple months after someone’s profit from him was noticed missing. It was only then that he mattered. And by then the connection was broken because no one cared enough to connect the stories.

Gideon stood, looked around the room. He walked over to a photo of the then not elderly man with a woman and a younger man, contemplatively picking it up. A family perhaps… no one to interpret it, no context, no meaning, just an image, a collection of molecules without consciousness.  He put it back gently, with respect, as it was precious even without a voice. He turned and took it all in, just as it had been left by that collection of molecules that had consciousness that had brought them together as part of his story. All of it would be collected and discarded, no profit to anyone so of no value to anyone.

Gideon reflected for a moment on what it was to be human, to have a life, live a story, to have choice and yet none, to control, to be controlled, to benefit from success in endeavors, and to be bullied for meaningless power by another, to know moments of joy, love, wonder, sadness, fear, pain.  There were so, so many conscious collections of molecules, now, in the past, to come in the future, billions upon billions, just in this one place in space. Overwhelmingly they would exist unknown to the others. For it all to be so significant and insignificant in the moment, but so meaningless in the end.  Forgotten, no cumulative value to these consciousnesses. The struggle was fought so hard for the stakes were insignificant. Did this make any sense? Did it need to have meaning outside its own existence? Was that not value enough? To these collections of molecules that became conscious it seemed not so to them. Some valued the others, many did not, as a whole they doomed themselves in the selfishness. To be able to be the source of peace, wonder and joy, why take so much pride in profiting over others, having power over others, not allowing others to simply be left alone to themselves in their moment of existence? He would never understand this.

And so, Gideon left, because it was inevitable.

The Comedy, The Tragedy

 

Why are some among us such assholes?

Written on a placard held by a protestor were the words, "Healthcare is a right!". My first thought was that of course it is. Food, shelter, education, to be treated with kindness and compassion... I don't understand why we humans have the need to deny others these things? If we have plenty, why do we argue about this? If we do not, why don't we struggle to share? Why do we create entire systems designed solely to deny these things to one another? Why are we divided along the lines of, "here, you need this" and "I have mine, get your own"?

To be fearless

Her question was a simple one. "How do I find that place where they are more worried about what I think, than I am about what they think?" 

I told her that is the foundation of the greed of wealth.

Small minds with knives

The mediocre with power 

will always preserve their power.

Always.