The truth of the matter is that all this ends with slipping off into the great unknown. It probably ends with nothingness, though I suppose one can hope for an afterlife in which all is just and all is fair and all our loved ones and dogs are there waiting on us.
I can’t bet on that ever happening. I lie down in the cool grass of August and let gentle breezes caress me, and I feel that ecstasy that takes me away from the banal considerations of life and places me into the moment, where we all ultimately live. Ruminations be damned.
Someday, my turn will come when I cease to be. I hope to live on only as a memory. Maybe my frenzied words on this page will last through the digital ether, and someone from the far future will read them. That more enlightened being of the long coming on years will probably stare at my vapid prose, laugh at my imbecilic barbarity, and maybe will come to some weird conclusion that I chronicled some bit of the current zeitgeist.
But once I go into that nonexistent state, I will not know any of these facts. I will know nothing. I will feel nothing. I will be nothing.
And yet I will be something for having lived as a human and passed on whatever talents and thoughts I could while I lived out my days as this particular creature.
And that’s the best I can do. For it ultimately comes down to these immortal words (oh, yes, words can be quite immortal!) of the great Sam Cooke:
“It’s been too hard living, but I’m afraid to die
‘Cause I don’t know what’s up there, beyond the sky.”
Indeed, I sometimes think it’s that fear that keeps mass suicides from happening, but even when I think that I know that the ecstasy of the cool grass in August and the soft breezes kissing the skin. I know that feeling when your dog looks you in the eye and asks only that you go and do something together.
And I know what it’s like to stare into your lover’s adoring eyes in the moonlight and feel so special to be loved so much by the person.
These are the things that make life softly sweet, despite what horrors and stupidity lie ahead.
So I will go on, casting my writings into the ether, and I’ll let your reading eyes peruse them and dissect them. And I hope you’ll tolerate me for my essential humanity, my triumphs and failures, and my irritations and my soothings.
And yet I know I have no more rights to existence than a silly old hamster. Strangely enough, it was hamsters that got me on this current flight of reverie.
I have been keeping a pair of Campbell’s dwarf hamsters as pets in a sort of vain attempt reclaim my childhood in which I kept a big colony of Syrian hamsters. For two summers, I was a hamster puppy miller, and I came to be such an expert on hamster behavior that I could tell a male from a female at a distance and I could tell when a female was receptive for mating just by the strength of her musty estrus odor.
Those were glory days for me. I raised my hamsters in my grandparents’ outbuilding, and I remember those nice summer nights when I would sit on their deck and listen to the hamster wheels screeching in the building just over there in the far end of the lawn.
This time as a hamster keeper, I switched species. The Campbell’s dwarf hamster is much more social than the Syrian species, and I purchased a pair, both wild-colored, dark gray with a dark dorsal stripe. The male and female were named “Boris” and “Natasha,” and I hoped they would breed.
And about six weeks after getting them, Natasha gave birth to four pink babies. I had heard wonderful things about the males of this species taking care of the young, but in truth I saw none of that behavior from Boris.
But he showed no aggression towards them at all, and I became quite excited at the possibility of having a little hamster colony once again. But in this colony, I would have my anthropomorphic husband and wife hamster that would raise their babies with love.
The little ones grew in their gray fur, and within three weeks, they were running about the terrarium which I had set up as their hamster enclosure.
And I expected more babies to come very soon. But yesterday when I went to feed the hamsters, I noticed something odd. Boris was nowhere to be seen, and I could count only three babies.
I sifted through the shavings that lined the hamster tank,and I discovered the macabre form of one of the babies. It was lying cold but not stiff. It had died with a simple bite to the skull. I assumed that Natasha had killed it. It is not unusual for hamsters to kill their own offspring, after all.
But I could not find Boris at all. So I sifted deeper and deeper into the shavings, and there I found a dismembered carcass. Boris had also been killed, but instead of leaving his remains alone in the corner of the tank, he had been cannibalized. His feet and head were eaten off, and all that remained were just some legs attached to a body trunk.
My little anthropomorphic fantasy was simply destroyed, knocked away in a quick, bestial act of interfamily cannibalism.
But I cannot just the brutish hamsters by human metrics. They are a long way from the Central Asian steppe, and despite being bred for generations for their tameness and ease of care, they are still quite wild animals. And more than that, they are wild animals we’ll never fully know, for they are still base and instinctive.
And yes, I’m sure that many are raised in nice little pairs like I thought I had, but this time, luck was not on my side.
I know that I live a safe existence as a human being, who is truly loved, and who does his best to show his love back. We are higher animals, after all.
And thus we tell ourselves that fact, even though when that time comes, we will be no better than a hamster whose wife decided he would make a nice meal.
We will be nothing more, and that fact surely is hard to fathom, when you live your whole life as a species that believes it is beyond nature so much that it will delude itself into believing that it won’t die.
I won’t delude myself. Or at least, I won’t do it so much as to cloud my better judgment. That’s a certain appeal of Christianity. Just believe that Jesus washes it all away, and you will live forever.
But you surely know you won’t. I don’t want to argue, but I know that no one really believes that death is not final. We all know it is.
It’s how we deal with that knowledge that sets out how how we will live. I will live as if it is finite, that there is nothing extra, and I will try to enjoy what there is to enjoy.
That’s the best I can offer. It’s not the hope of the faith of my youth, but it’s more realistic, if more grim. To stare the bear in the eye as it begins its charge requires a bit of courage, and a simple accounting of oneself in the universe.
And I will been doing that accounting from here on out. At least that’s what it looks like.
