Laundry, Absurdity and Bygones
If the world were to come to an end tomorrow, none of this would matter. And it wouldn't even have to be a catastrophe to the extent that the Earth would cease to exist, but something so just catastrophic enough to render every living thing incapable of surviving. Shakespeare. Quantum Theory. Political disagreements. What I plan to eat for dinner. None of that would matter. Not only would it not matter but in the absence of any sentient extraterrestrial life, it wouldn't be remember. The ever expanding cosmos would continue grow, a vacuous black abyss swallowing the unknowable, incomprehensible space that exists on the other side of this universe's borders.
This is what my thoughts drifted to while putting my freshly laundered dress shirts away. I thought about a ten year high school reunion in 2013 and then how there's so much hype around December 2012 and if some earth ending event did occur that reunion would never happen and how everything would cease to have meant anything or mean anything.
Laundry is a good time to think. I'm removed from my usual pursuits. My hands are busy with the mundaneness of the task at hand which leaves my mind to wander. It's absurd. And if something like that did happen doing laundry seems absurd. Everything does. Yet there I was doing my laundry and here I am typing about how absurd it was which is probably even more absurd.
In the absence of any concrete beliefs of life after death or higher beings, this is what I believe in: nothingness to an absurd degree. If we define the world in the terms we need to keep our sanity, to keep some kind of foundation underneath us, then why have I chosen this? That part of it has never made much sense to me. What drives me to believe this when I could have turned to believe something else along the way? Religion didn't stick. Nothing else has. Only this: some Camus-ian sense of absurdity that ties me to a rock and a hill and repetitive mundane actions.
And somehow I'm okay with it. Somehow this is the narrative of cosmological order that agrees with me the most, the lens through which all things are filtered. It doesn't bother me. If anything what bothers me more is that fact that I sometimes feel I'm in the minority. I could be wrong.
It's rained today already. It looks set to rain again. You can just tell by how the wind is blowing through the trees. It's a very particular kind of rustling sound, a particular way that the gray in the sky contrasts to the green of the trees.
I've become kind of enamored with the word “bygone” as a noun, taken with the idea of “a bygone” being a singular unit of which together combine to make bygones, the kind which you let be themselves. A single unit of the past which is left unbroached.
This is what my thoughts drifted to while putting my freshly laundered dress shirts away. I thought about a ten year high school reunion in 2013 and then how there's so much hype around December 2012 and if some earth ending event did occur that reunion would never happen and how everything would cease to have meant anything or mean anything.
Laundry is a good time to think. I'm removed from my usual pursuits. My hands are busy with the mundaneness of the task at hand which leaves my mind to wander. It's absurd. And if something like that did happen doing laundry seems absurd. Everything does. Yet there I was doing my laundry and here I am typing about how absurd it was which is probably even more absurd.
In the absence of any concrete beliefs of life after death or higher beings, this is what I believe in: nothingness to an absurd degree. If we define the world in the terms we need to keep our sanity, to keep some kind of foundation underneath us, then why have I chosen this? That part of it has never made much sense to me. What drives me to believe this when I could have turned to believe something else along the way? Religion didn't stick. Nothing else has. Only this: some Camus-ian sense of absurdity that ties me to a rock and a hill and repetitive mundane actions.
And somehow I'm okay with it. Somehow this is the narrative of cosmological order that agrees with me the most, the lens through which all things are filtered. It doesn't bother me. If anything what bothers me more is that fact that I sometimes feel I'm in the minority. I could be wrong.
It's rained today already. It looks set to rain again. You can just tell by how the wind is blowing through the trees. It's a very particular kind of rustling sound, a particular way that the gray in the sky contrasts to the green of the trees.
I've become kind of enamored with the word “bygone” as a noun, taken with the idea of “a bygone” being a singular unit of which together combine to make bygones, the kind which you let be themselves. A single unit of the past which is left unbroached.