L’shana tovah! It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, so for those of you who celebrate it, I hope you have a good one.
It’s Saturday, also, of course, and I am going in to the office. I can hardly claim to feel slighted to be working on Rosh Hashanah, since if I were actually observant, I would never be working on any Saturday, since that is Shabbat. I would be hypocritical to try to claim the day off by some form of religious right.
It is also rather sad and frustrating that I just have no one with whom to celebrate this and other important days. Tomorrow is another very important day, and of course next weekend begins Yom Kippur, which is the so-called highest of the holy days.
Anyway, all that’s neither here nor there. It has nothing to do with me other than memories. I can’t even share well-wishes with people on Facebook as I used to do, thanks to my weird expulsion from Meta’s sites.
But it’s not as though anyone has a right to Facebook. Not even the people who created it have a right to it. It can all be taken from them at any moment by the whims of fate, and sooner or later, it all will be taken from them, just as everything else will be taken from everyone else as well.
Again, happy new year.
Each day is the beginning of a new year depending on one’s point of view. And every second is the beginning of a new day, and so on. Likewise, each day is the end of a year, and each second is the end of a day.
And each moment is the end of some noteworthy number of lives. Every day is the last day some parent out there will lift and carry their child. Every day is the last day some parent will ever see their child, and every day is the last day some child will see their parent.
Every moment is, for someone out there, the last moment they will spend with the person they love the most.
This is not even counting the suffering, the fear, and the deaths of non-human animals and other forms of life.
So, yeah. Happy, happy. Joy, joy.
Sorry, I know I’m being perhaps even more of a downer than usual. It’s what I’m best at, I suspect. I should charge for my services; after all, like the Joker said, if you’re good at something you should never do it for free.
I don’t know if there’s actually a market for what I’m selling, though. I’m down to about a dozen or fewer regular readers here, and it’s not as though anyone’s sharing my posts or calling them to the attention of friends as being entertaining or insightful. That’s not surprising.
I am quite creative in many ways, but those ways all tend toward the dark and horrible. Way back when I was writing the first science fiction/fantasy* novel I ever completed, some of the best parts in it were the “horror” elements, which just crept in as I wrote the type of story I liked to write.
I seem mainly to be a source of darkness in the world‒though I’ve been part of bringing some wonderful things into the world as well. I’ve even done my share of good deeds, and possibly more than my share. That’s pretty much over now, though.
Of course, darkness doesn’t require me to bring it into existence. It makes no difference to the universe if one declares oneself, say, an Agent of Chaos or of Entropy. That’s about as sensible as someone claiming to be an agent of gravity or of the electromagnetic force.
Real things, fundamental things, don’t require human (or other) agents to carry them out. They simply are, they happen, there is no avoiding them. They happen with or without anyone even knowing they happen. This is one of the things that should make everyone suspicious of every religion, really: why would real omnipotent force require agents?
So yeah, like I said, every moment is laden with loss and suffering and death, and ironically, this will only ever end if and when everyone and everything is dead.
Happy New Year.
*Yes, it counted as science fiction and fantasy. That was one of the points of it: it told of an ultra-high tech, space faring civilization that also used “magic”.
