Metro Pulse/Snarls/...And a Crappy New Year

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Pondering the imponderables

by Scott McNutt

New year, hah! What's new about it? The economy is in the tank, politicians in Washington are still practicing CYA strategies, George Bush is planning a war with Saddam Hussein, Victor Ashe is mayor, Tim Hutchison is sheriff, the downtown jail's still crowded, I-75/40 traffic still bogs down at rush hour, gas prices are high, "greed is good," and corporate scumbags are still corporate scumbags—It might as well be 1991.

It's deja voodoo.

We got a used year.

In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if it had been used before '91. 1952, 1941, 1865, 1714, 1666, 1548, 1407, 1000, 421, 6, 537 B.C., probably even back in one million years B.C. when Raquel Welch still looked good in a fur bikini—it's all happened before: war, crime, poverty, pollution, disease. Dictators, "liberators," agitators, prevaricators, ejaculators, investigators, prognosticators, commentators—the common denominator constipators of every age. So what's new about this year? And why do we even care?

Don't ask me, I just work here.

Remember back at the turn of the millennium? Remember all those people who believed Nostradamus's or the Mayan calendar's or whomever's apocalyptic predictions and claimed that the world was about to end? Remember the smaller, less vocal, but still significant group who believed that the coming of the new millennium would bring 1,000 years of peace? Don't you wish you'd taken 5-to-1 against all of them? Hey, they should put their money where their mouths are.

Beats betting on the Vols.

So, again, if nothing really changes, and today's about the same as yesterday, and equally similar to tomorrow, then—what's the point? What difference can one lifetime make? Here we are, struggling with our mortgage, our hiccuping Honda Civic, our kids' indifference to our values, our beast of a boss, our own occasional failings of faith, and little Bobby needs to go to the dentist, Pauline wants that fanny tuck, and what in the world am I getting Natalie for her birthday? She wants to start wearing makeup already, fer chrissake, and the garbage disposal's broke, do I have enough in checking to get it fixed, and.... Why? Why bother? Each of our lives is a mere drop in the sea of human history, one minute grain in the endless sands of time, one infinitesimal flicker in a limitless universe of blinding stars. Is life a cosmic joke?

Let the farce be with you, Luke.

Jesus said, I am the way and the truth and the life. Buddha said the material world is pain. Archimedes said, give me a lever large enough, and I'll move the world. Des Cartes said, I think, therefore I am. Nietzsche said, God is dead. Nietzsche is dead, God said. Steve Martin said, comedy is not pretty.

Neither is life.

I don't know, I really don't know. What drives us to continue, to endure, to exist in the face of such seemingly overwhelming, cosmic indifference, such vast, universal capriciousness? Oh, I've heard all the answers, the faiths people live by, the scientific explanation of our biological imperative to procreate, even the macrocosmic, mechanistic, quasi-religiouscientific view that, tiny as we are, each of us somehow comprises an essential component of a living universe.

Tell that to your sweetie the next time it's your turn to change the diapers.

None of these answers seem to apply to the single, mundane life. On the one hand, I value my life, and I have friends and family who would grieve terribly were I to die tomorrow. (And some would be pissed. I owe them money.) On the other, life in a global sense would continue more or less the same the next day, and the Earth would continue spinning on its axis, circling the Sun, oblivious to the consciousness so recently snuffed out on its surface. So again, does it matter?

HELL, YES!

Hey, this is my life we're talking about! Excuse me for being selfish, but you aren't snuffing my candle without a fight. I ain't going quietly into that good night. Maybe it is just primitive survival instinct, but I'm jealous about giving this life up, thank you very much. I don't have a rationale, I don't have a creed, I don't have the "why" of the significance of any one life, but I'm keeping the one I've got. Go get your own.

Happy New Year's.