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New World Order & Eight Miles

Walked eight miles on Monday to try to chase away the gloom. I walked as briskly as I could muster. My shirt was soaked in sweat.

It is interesting to think about how my world has changed. My only spot of beauty is seen in my wife and kids. I used to think my job was beautiful. Now it is just a means to survival. I used to see meaning in the gallant fight to do "good" in the world and to strive to make the world "better". Now I think I was a dottering old fool to think of that as a goal. Don Quixote is dead.

My mother's passing also has deeply shaped my current life. I used to be naive and feel there was a purpose to my life. Now I think there is no purpose. I am merely a random blip on the screen of the monitor of our universe. I am nothing, I mean nothing, nothing I do means anything. It matters not if I eat or if I do not eat. It matters not if I sleep or do not sleep. It matters not if I breath or do not breath. My only purpose, if it is even that, is to simply try to help my wife and kids remain blind to (or if they are not blind to it, for them to ignore) the horrors I know that await us all in the future. That inevitable march to death. That walk into a void of utter emptiness and infinite haze of shear loneliness and utterly frightening solitude and nothingness.

A strand of my current research into neuroendocrine development is showing surprisingly strong results. In my prior life, I would be jumping up and down, grinning a wide, furry-faced grin from ear-to-ear with anticipation and would be talking about it incessantly with any ear I could find. Now, in the new world order I find myself in, it is simply data I am collecting. No more, no less. I will continue to plod on and work on this and other projects, but they have no meaning to me. There is no sense of adventure nor of quest as I had always framed my research work before. Teaching also has changed. In my previous life, I was a firey motivator, and was animated and boisterous in class, getting my opinions on science as well as the content out to a wide audience. Now in the new world order, teaching is simply me talking a bit in front of some students.

Life used to be a cinnamon and raisin bagel, toasted lightly, and with an enormous dollop of pineapple and walnut laced cream cheese on top. Now, life is a piece of dry, butterless, white toast that has gone soggy around the edges from humidity.

Time, time, time... it is as Simon & Garfunkle said, a hazy shade of winter.

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