Your passion burned away ...

Life is funny, strange, and filled with bullshit.

You spend your life chasing phantoms called "desire", "whim", "hope", a "future".

But with each failure, each flaw, each crack, you watch those drives get burned away - as if reality were a hot torch, a plasma torch, that sears away that layer of compulsion. With each hope that fades, there is less interest in the next hope. With every "success", comes the inevitable denouement, the Wagnerian Götterdämmerung. Each of us, bound to a wheel, eternally spinning over a fire - it's not torture, it is instruction. It is life's way of preparing us for death.

I've had the misfortune of watching two people I love die of stage 4 cancer in the last ten years - one was a mom, one was a sister who was only 43 years old. They were both "breast cancer survivors", but here is what I know about cancer: you survive the first one, and that's great, but if its "cousin" returns for a visit? - you end up shiv'd, in an alley some place, bleeding out slowly. I've known people who survive the "first cancer", I've known almost no one that survives the second.

You watch a person die of cancer, you spend time around them being poisoned by chemo and radiation, it is instructive. It is the Cliff Notes version of life - you will have everything taken from you, no matter who you are, no matter how evil or innocent. Even if you believe in an afterlife, this does not change the fact that THIS LIFE is ephemeral, twisted, and not at all about "perpetual happiness".

Don't get me wrong - I've had some joy, some happiness. But the joy I've felt feels like a tease now. It seems to me that "joy", as such, is life's way of mocking us. It's as if the universe is saying "here buddy, here's a little something, in tidbit form, of that thing you're always chasing ... but watch out buddy ... it's a scam."

Your passion and desire will be burned away.

Your love, your concern, your drive, your "will to power", washes up like so many pieces of driftwood on the shores of calamity.

Empires fall ... it is axiomatic, the faster they rise, the faster they fall.

Fame and fortune - they're just dried leaves in the autumn winds ...

Love? - if such a thing exists, it is, at best, the clutching of two lonely souls, in the emptiness - clutching at straws.

Respect?

Admiration?

Honor and duty?

These are all shams too.

The best you can hope for, no matter where you are in life, is that your memory is fickle and protective - that it becomes that squishy, neuronal, Potemkin Village, glossing over the truth of desire, hope, wishes and whims - and the inevitable disappointment which follows.

Everything you care about will be burnt away ...

Everyone you love will be gone one day too ...

The buildings, bridges, roads, homes? - these also fall victim to entropy and dissolution.

Thank God for life's burning plasma torch ...

If you are lucky, you leave this life missing nothing, longing for nothing ...

And to nothingness you will return ...

To nothingness we all return.