That’s the understatement of the year.
I was going to post something to explain my rather intense rant about the first Muslim woman space tourist and why, in the long run, it would be economics not kinetics that make the Arab world change its attitudes about women and society. However after the day I had today, that kind of stuff can wait. Its not like the Arabs are listening to me, or anyone else anyway.
Because I got some really s***ty news today. News that shows me again just how brutally unfair the world is. How good people get screwed over while s**theads get away with anything they want.
Oh, and for the benefit of Helen Dunn and the other morons at the US Naval Academy, I’m planning on my BAC topping out somewhere in the neighborhood of risky alcohol consumption and unacceptable use. Boo f**king hoo! Excuse me while I go to the fridge for another beer!
A former boss of mine and a man I count as a friend lost his wife to cancer yesterday. I count this man as a friend and a good guy. Both he and his wife were. They were good to me at a time in my life when I needed it. We did not see eye to eye on many things, particularly the Navy’s ever increasing trend to play big brother, but he never let professional crap get in the way of personal friendship.
Now, he gets to have raise 3 boys on his own. Someone please explain to me how this somehow makes sense. Because for the life of me I don’t see how. Of course this drama gets played out daily, every time a CACO team comes to deliver the news of yet another American killed in Iraq. A mother who dies at 44 of breast cancer. A person awaiting an organ transplant who dies before matching tissue can be obtained.
Regarding the last item. In my beer befuddled state, it seems quite logical that we should start dropping GTMO prisoners through trap doors and harvesting their organs for those who deserve them more. Certainly these Muslim scum are not putting them to any good use. Maybe we can recycle them. The people waiting for organ transplants might think that was a good idea. That’s’ about the only good I can think can come from GTMO………..
Shocked , you say? Yea, I know it violates about 100 treaties and laws, but its what China does every day. And we try to build a “cooperative relationship with them”. Its crap and I know it. However its just another example to me of how unfair this little world is.
Please don’t tell me its God’s will either. It may be, but all that makes me want to do is argue with God. Its the old dilemma of Job, namely why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? According to the Talmud though, Job never really existed. He was a parable to those of us, to teach us all how to perservere. That of course enrages zealots of several faiths. The Bible and the Koran are God’s literal words, they say. I don’t accept that. I believe in God as sure as I believe the sun will come up tomorrow, but he has his own ways to teach us what he wanted us to know. And those lessons are not as literal as some would have us believe. God must surely be like my father in his forbearance, than the thundering tyrant that some would have us believe.
Wow! I must be drinking to get off on a rant about GTMO and God. Lets start this one again shall we?
Before I had come into work today and made the mistake of answering the phone, I slid on over to E @ L and read his thoughts on life today. He does not know it, but what he wrote really spoke to me today. Because his frustration exactly echoes my own:
At a certain point in your life, one day just like any other, you might be stirring a coffee, breaking off a piece of cookie, watching people walking past along Orchard Rd…
You realize you no long think about what you are going to do with the rest of your life.
You are thinking about what you haven’t done with the life you’ve already led. Your life is no longer a tight ball of potential energy, no longer that fireball burst of kinetic brilliance amazing everyone, it is entropic – the dissipating energy of something falling apart. You know this because when family and old friends talk about you behind your back, they use that word: “dissipation.”
The spoon stands still in your cup. But it shakes slightly in your aged hand.
You are old. It has crept upon you. You are well past half-way. Past your peak – and gathering speed towards an ending you can foresee all too clearly, coming all too soon.
You are no longer anticipating building your life into something amazing, special, something to be proud of. You are trying rather to fill in the gaps of an incomplete and haphazard existence. To patch the cracks, make it look a coherent whole. You are thinking about what you didn’t do when you had the chance and you realize the opportunities to redress are fading.
You don’t have a future, you have regrets.
You don’t have ambition, you have have a collection of fading laurels, heavily squashed.
It is the weekend. You don’t know what to do, you don’t know what you WANT to do. You don’t even care WHY you’d want to anything anyway.
One morning recently you saw a sunrise. The number of sunrises you will watch in the rest of your life now seems finite, limited. A handful at most, unless you decide to become a bird watcher or something requiring an early rise. Unlikely. The only sunrise possible for you is when you take your hooker out to her taxi after a mildly embarrassing short-time and she wants to leave at 6am. Your snoring was keeping her awake. Your chance of redressing your drunken inadequacies with a wake-up piss hard-on has faded, of getting your money’s worth.
You don’t make plans for new projects, you are too frantic looking for excuses for what went wrong in those enterprises you abandoned incomplete.
The game has played out.
That gorgeous girl, the one you fancied, everyone fancied, once you might done something about that fancy, might once might have made an effort to woo and maybe won, but no, not now; she thinks of you as “avuncular” and presumably asexual. Now you merely lech, go home to masturbate morosely.
Futility.
Now that is writing I can relate to! Smug self assured types will simply laugh and say, “well, its all your own fault!”
To which I respond: “Maybe. However the financial straightjacket you and your moralist lawyer friends put me in does not help one bit. Why don’t you just , to borrow a British phrase, SOD OFF! You are providing no help here.-YOU DICK!”
Becasue its my party and I’ll cry if I want to.
And it still does not solve the root cause of my distess, someone is not in the world who should be. And the world does not care. The world will go on and soon the memory will be hard to retain. A stone somewhere will have a name. And that will be it. No glory, no great fame, just a family’s and friend’s rememberance that will grow colder with time.
” Nobody ever said life was going to be fair. At least no one ever said it to me.”
Yea well it should be. But its not.
I had hope to interject some humor here. However to tell the truth, I don;t feel like it. I do feel like drinking some more though. Thinking all the while. And leaving you with a quote from Albert Camus, one of my favorite authors:
There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved–and not the reverse.
Now to let the whiskey spin me on down to oblivion………..A rambling post to be sure. However its the news and its what’s on my mind. Hopefully it says something in its meandering.
