One hundred

This is my 100th post to this "blog." It was supposed to be a long essay that I could be very proud of, about the rise of Gnostic thought in American consumerism, and about how hedonism degraded the body while true asceticism exalted the body, blah blah blah. But that essay never really materialized, and I haven't posted for almost two months. Maybe I'll finish it sometime, I don't know.

Instead, there are no theses, no solid propositions, nothing organized to say. My mother and sister miraculously were not killed in a car accident two weekends ago. Instead of thinking high-minded academic thoughts, I sit in my room in silence and tinker and build; I employ my hands to root myself in a physical reality, a manual safety --- to take my mind off of the fact that half of my family could have died, should have died, but didn't. I can't explain this in purely rational, materialist terms. I watched my mother try to open her swollen eyes after emergency brain surgery and I crumbled, because all the rational thought in the world is dust in the face of something so incomprehensible. It happens every day, it's average. Yet it seems that no logic or abstraction can give any insight into something as fundamental as fear of loss. This is where the limits of our psychological supports become most apparent.

I remember when I was 18, I knew everything. By the time I turn 24 next month, I will know absolutely nothing. It's a stupid cliché: you don't know the value of anything until you face the prospect of losing it. No one knows the value of human life until they see how easily it may be crushed. You invincible captains of pleasure, epicurean connoisseurs of human sense and drama, cosmopolitans, remember: life is fragile, life is short.