what i was thinking at the bus stop:

you have a heart in
your chest. it has four chambers,
works like his, like hers.




every religious philosophy that i know of pares down to an afterlife, a heaven. you do the right things now so you can be rewarded for them later. even beliefs that are centered on the idea of reincarnation come down to that, live right now or you'll pay for it later. hardcore puritan predestination ethics dictated that, even though you couldn't do jack about your fate, you'd better live like you were headed for paradise, because you'd hate to wind up there and be the asshole in the room. it's all about the distant future, and it's all about you. you. you. you. you.

no. no, it's not. it's not about that. i think

it's about math. balanced equations, a value for every variable, nature adhering to formulas and principles. it's about energy being neither created nor destroyed. or it's about learning to think of the planet as an organism, a single body, and of human beings as individual cells composing a common tissue. if all of the cells communicate they can perform their necessary function, but a breakdown or a change in a few cells can destroy the entire organ. so the human race is one organ. what good is your body to you if only your liver is working, or your pancreas, or one lung? you need everything, right? make a list of all the parts of your body you can think of. now cross off all the items you think of as expendable.

now think about how many cells die and are shuffled out of your system in a twenty-four-hour period.

now think about what would happen to your body if those cells weren't broken down and removed.

you are one cell. i am one cell. the high-school student who accidentally shortchanged you at the drugstore is one cell. that student's goldfish is one cell. the squirrel in your bird feeder is one cell. the tree the squirrel lives in is one cell.

how much of your body dies in a day? how much is created? how much of it are you indifferent to? how much of it would you willingly destroy? how much of it would you passively allow someone else to destroy?

i am microscopic and essential. i exist to perform one specific function, but from where i am it's impossible for me to know the full extent of my role, how it affects the rest of the body. i only hope that my instincts will guide me toward some sort of behavior that benefits the whole system. i might allow for reincarnation, but i imagine it as being more like recycling, everything ending up as a part of something else.

i think it's about that. and it's about a lot of other things, too. but not some unknowable eternity, not heaven or hell. not me. none of this is about me. and none of this is about you. it couldn't be.

i have begun to think of my species as a malignancy. i am watching the rank necrosis at its center bleed out into everything in contact with it like ink into crepe paper. the signature of a tumor is that it has ceased to communicate with the rest of the body. it can only recognize itself and its own hunger.

we are failing, here on this planet. we are selfish and we are blind, we are hacking off chunks of our own flesh and feeding it to the flesh that's left. i do what i can to save those small lives that i am able to save, but there isn't a way for me to ever do enough. i think there will never again be such a thing for us as enough.

finally, a fucking bus. these thirty-nines take forever lately.