Domicile: We'll Go Outside
Click to viewRalph staggered on in the darkness of the early morning hours, half sleepwalking & half correcting his faultering gait. He felt awful, like absolute shit. In his mind, the words of an old veteran he'd overhead at the local labor hall one morning kept playing in his head, wherein he described two POW's as looking like "miserable beaten dogs, covered in shit from head to toe"; it played in a constant loop in his mind- less in mockery and more as a cautionary self-diagnosis. Yet he kept on- along empty darkened streets, the spooky hooting of an owl in the trees his only distraction. Ralph found he was grateful for that unsettling sound- it reminded him he was awake and alive, and that meant it wasn't over yet. Hollow victory & bitter defeat have one thing in common- they are both temporary. Seeing how his present predicament indicated both, that put Ralph squarely in the dark October country he found himself stumbling through- disoriented, yet not quite lost; certainly not the kind of lost Our Lady of The Questionable Blessing told people like him they were, in any case.
Perhaps Ralph WAS lost to manipulations by man & woman, not the god of nebulous inexplicable intangibleness that- if real- was as ill-defined as all the quantities humans who- having been coaxed into trading faith for questionable science- attempted to measure in quantifiable terms as fake as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. God is dead, and his chosen sheep weren't even aware their faith was in units of weight & measure, not an unexplainable miracle. They turn to the god of the atom whilst speaking false witness to their so-called creator, making him a man whom does not exist within the parameters of their skeptical minds. If, as Ralph reasoned there in the dark with the hooting calling him onward, if he was in fact a miserable dog, he was far better off than the happy Christians he would soon be waist-deep in- for he had a clear conscience that he knew nothing but the dark & the haunting bleakness of the lone owl. The strongest are often alone much of the time- the weak congregate in the vain hope of escape & security, yet the world offers none. Crawl into a hole in the wall- anything with reach can get to you.
Science held out the promise of improving human life, but in trying to measure and quantify it, it has only rendered it devoid of meaning based upon arbitrarily assigned human values that are themselves meaningless symbolic value judgements. If it is one thing science hasn't done, it is make life better OR easier> If anything, it serves as yet another set of values to justify killing other people, just as religion did before it.
Ralph was spurred on by this realization, and as his pulse quickened, his body began to wake up & become more responsive; shaking off the lethargy, he straightened his posture & picked up his pace. He had already been walking almost two hours, one more hour's worth of walking would bring him to his intended destination. He suddenly wished he'd brought some plastic bags to carry things in...