Locandiera

Self-portrait in despair and hunter orange

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own." --Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Rebuilding directory… Speed reduced by disk malfunction: 357,263 failed attempts to access data.

"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." --Job

I'm beginning to feel like Ahab with his white whale. All he lost was his leg. What does what I lost matter? It doesn't.

I don't side with Job on this one, though. There are far worse losses than mine, his included. People get sick and die, houses burn down, children have their throats slit and are thrown down wells. Maybe I have even experienced personally far worse losses, but this one feels so purposefully malicious, so pointlessly brutal, so capricious--in short, so cruel, and so clearly an act of God, that I can't let it go.

There seems to be no point except: nothing you do matters, Melissa.

If nothing I do matters, then what does this post matter? What do my words on page matter? What do stories matter? What's the point of putting them down? It's all ephemeral as dust. As electrons charging and recharging.

"Every word is a meaningless stain on silence and nothingness." That one's Samuel Beckett. I'm with him.