Mykeru Returns

after a long absence, the reverend returns:

A while back I grew sick of writing this site, even though I was, as some said, not one of the more prolific bloggers around. I stopped biking to work. I stopped going to the gym. I got, as it were, into a wicked funk. I even toyed with a a trip to the bottle a couple times even thought I'm exactly the sort of person who shouldn't drink. How the big bloggers could plug away, day after day, chronicling the never ending parade of lies and horrors is a complete mystery to me. The absurdity of the meaningless-work-a-day bullshit of the whole enterprise got to me. And I'm still not over it. I didn't lose faith in God, or a political solution, or even my fellow man. I'm an atheist, I think politics is a kicked-over bucket of shit and I do believe that, left to their own devices, most people are selfish assholes. What I lost faith in was our ability to keep lying to ourselves in this country that we are interested in making a life worth living.

And, quite frankly, I got bloody sick and tired about writing about lying-assed right-wing assholes who will never stop not telling the truth and the atrocity du jour coming from the current administration. I mean, really, here we are in an 15 billion year old universe with a sparse 70 years worth of life allotted to ourselves and we've got to deal with these petty little pin-headed assholes? What the fuck? There's absurdity, and there's lying through one's ass, but these people combine the two like weasels fucking.

i've blogged infrequently in the last year. i ran out of things to say. i realized that our politics and our political structure suck beyond belief. 'absurd' is a good word for the human condition. the reverend and i share an appreciation for camus.

the protagonist in The Stranger is arrested for murdering an arab. at his trial, it comes to light that he seemed emotionally unaffected by his mother's death, and so he is executed for not loving his mother. The Plague addresses the experience of living in a quarantined city where the bubonic plague has struck. there is the usual 'god is punishing us for our sins' response. and there's the predictable 'why isn't anyone (someone else) doing something!' outcry. camus rejects despair and indifference in these novels. the question 'why care?' also asks 'why not care?'

i guess having to deal with pin-headed assholes is just part of the human experience. apparently, despite its extraordinary and awe-inspiring aspects, it also involves having to deal with annoying, profoundly stupid, reckless, and often evil human beings. we have to suffer. we have to be aware of the fact that we're going to die. we have to feel. we have to choose between bad options a lot of the time. we have to deal with our own tragically flawed nature. can we overcome that? i don't know what it means to overcome human nature. maybe we can learn to work with it.