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A Time Of Great Hurtling

On the hell of other people

Today is November 15th and I just randomly remembered that October 10th was a day on which, according to horoscopes and people who know such things, terrible things were supposed to transpire. I am unclear which terrible things, I just remember that someone told me that around that time. It seemed plausible. Terrible things transpire every day.

The memory of that came back to me today as I was climbing a set of stairs with a mop and three books in my hand, and it got me thinking about the nature of being alive on a planet hurtling toward something that you don’t really know what it is. All you know is that there is significant hurtling. “It was a a time of great hurtling,” one might say. (Please put that on a stone so that future generations my find it.) But then maybe great hurtling is just the feeling of living in a, what’s the word, society — which is to say a situation in which other people have a pretty large impact on your lived experience. As an annoying guy I tried to avoid in freshman year used to say, “Hell is other people.”

I came to the conclusion today that every problem, every discomfort we face is, in nature, either political, spiritual or some combination of both. The thought came to be during a conversation with my teenage son who is frustrating me by doing the thing most teens do to frustrate their parents: he is not being how I would like him to be. His shortcomings (as I view them) are not just to do with…