Everybody has a few indelible moments in their lives. Game changers. A few of mine: being shown my first Playboy by the neighborhood kids, saying goodbye to my family on the first day of college, recognizing that I am going to die.
A few months ago I announced on Facebook that I am an Atheist. I guess it was narcissistic of me to expect a reaction, even some subterranean snark rattle.
This silence is instructive to me. It tells me what I already know in the part of my brain that has grown up - nobody's really keeping score. Not amongst us, really, in a way that matters. And, as suggested before, not in the stars, either.
This means that I am alone with my life. And, appraising it now, I have been very narcissistic, very lazy. My narcissism suggests that clutching to resentments wins me points in some cosmic Taste ledger. It recommends elaborate rationalizations for why social misgivings lie at others' feet and not my own. Its sneers buttress the glass walls, goad me to ridicule, seduce into complacency.
It is easy to stand in front of a dairy aisle and smell blood on the wind. From behind, history's deathstench, permanent, like the ghost of a murderous uncle blowing out birthday candles. And from a distance, the annihilating nothingness of the last moment.
How small these feelings of inadequacy and hatred are. How unworthy to occupy the tiny, thrumming engine of my brief machine.
I can't say it enough. I am alone with the contents of my heart. We are alone. We choose our tenants.
And how, how, how do you evict the delinquent ones?
