the spider diary

What screws us up? How is it that we can come so close to the core of the realities that drive us insane, the fundamental irrationalities that drive us to abuse food, drink, drugs, cars, climate control, sleep, and sex, and not be able to make it over the top. What stops us as a society, as a world of nations? Nobody wants to be at war. Nobody thinks they're asking for more than they deserve. And yet we are constantly at war, and there are always so many who clearly do not have enough, and a few who clearly have far, far more than any person could justify or deserve (or even use).

I think it's the fact that the truth is not pretty. The truth is a mean, ugly, cussed snapping turtle preparing to take off the tip of your finger to teach you the price of hestitation, of ignorance, of underestimating the impact of slow adversaries who bide their moment till the time is right to strike.

There is a tiny spider, no larger than a double-ought steel shotgun pellet, inhabiting my windowsill. Its general morphology and fuzzy mandibles tell me it is a jumping, hunting spider. Whether it's doing well or poorly, I can't tell: I know that the nature of these sorts of creatures are to overproduce in recognition of the legions that die without giving their DNA a fighting chance. So there's a good possibility that the rotting edge of my windowsill is this creature's last stand, the final culmination of a life that went terribly wrong, though no fault of its own.

There's no difference between my life and that little spiders, and that is the ugly truth that I tried to escape for eight long years, until I saw the light and learned to embrace life on the edge of chaos as the only kind of life there is. For that little spider's life to succeed it will have to hunt where it was hunted, it will have to face its own death a hundred times. Sooner or later it will be taken. Sooner or later it will happen to us all. For me, and for my spider, there's only NOW: because the hard and ugly yet strangely beautiful truth is that it doesn't really matter to anyone whether it's sooner or later: all possibility lies solely in our collective now.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.