PCAPPC

I took a walk through life, and came uncomfortably to its conclusion. In a parking lot emptied of its day travelers who packed the foul weather gear in their cars and drove home before the sun had stopped compensating for the cold. I have no car here, no ride home. Just a summit of sorts they say I fell from when I was born, and I wonder what all the trouble was for. Those who make pilgrimages to this place don't know the desolation of death. They come for the scenery, the far away abstracted peace of the destination they mistake for the journey's reward. I see, now, from this distance, all that time and obstinance have denied me. All that I once had, held, let go, and left behind. I lived in expectations, and experience was the road that led to them. But each dissolved with the touch and all I see now is the road, meandering in mystery and disappearing into the dusk.

We're all working on our legacy, but, seriously, legacies are overrated. No one would recognize themselves in the caricatures and the biographies which took their places when the memories died with those who knew them. Even the reflections are false, and if our friends were all talented writers able to capture our essence in words, the person each knew would be different from all the others, and none of them would be us. There is no such thing as metempsychosis, the transference of self, the transmigration of the soul, and life after death. The self is as transient and insubstantial as a dream. The soul was conjured in the desolation of a fractured world, divided into the domestic and the natural. The universe and its agents of cause and observation, the gods and the autonomous selves, were all manufactured to appease the wild in us, and make us civilized. God and Self is a circular argument and the wheel of artifice which, with its turning, reduces the universe to someth...

Nature or nurture is a silly argument, and shows just how far down the rabbit hole of reason we've descended. Darwin made death the most essential tool of evolution. The rest was chance, another roll of the dice every time a cell divides. Epidemics and extinctions were the hammer and nail held in reserve for when a screw wouldn't do. We seem to have been made facilitators of the next Big Death by the endowment of our ancestors' inclination to sacrifice themselves to a fiction sustained by their belief. We, and the world, will one day die for the glory of God, Allah, Jesus, the Lizard King, or simply an idea, an ideology, a cleansing truth that rids the world of its pestilent facts, its wearisome reality.