Time, Mortality, & Hate

Time again: The end of another month.  It seems as though they’re ticking off like the timer on a bomb and one of these days there’ll be an explosion that only I will hear.  God, I have to stop being so concerned with time passing.  It must just be me.  The first song I ever wrote, begun when I was about fifteen and finished when I was eighteen, was “Time Will Tell.”  So I guess my preoccupation with old tempus and his fugiting has been lifelong.

Mortality Blues: My mother died twelve years ago. Hard to believe it’s been that long. She was in the hospital after she had fallen and broken her hip. Old folks’ hips are like glass and so easily broken and so nearly impossible to repair, so often the prelude to death as it was with her. We flew home in time to see her and say goodbye before she decided to slip away. Such a permanent thing, last goodbyes. About a decade ago, every now and then I’d get this wave of depression at the thought of my own mortality. It was never an intellectual thing, something to ponder. One moment I’d be thinking about what I was doing that day and then suddenly it would overwhelm me and I’d feel this rush of emotion about what it would actually mean when I died. This long (all too short) practical joke will be over and what will it mean, what will my existence have meant? Then the feeling would go away for several months only to pop up again when I wasn’t paying attention. I think I may now be resigned to unfulfilled dreams, lack of recognition for what I’ve written, never hearing any of the songs I penned. With resignation comes acceptance comes a quasi-contentment.

Short Essay on Hate: I’d like to examine the nature of hate and what it does to the soul. Let’s say someone has hurt me badly and I now want to get even. I keep imagining all these scenarios where I confront the person and say the things my spleen really wants, needs, to say. I want to hurt him physically as well as psychically. I want to expose him to the world for what he is, a cowardly little liar. This kind of hate can make the hater physically ill, almost to the point of vomiting. The nature of hate is that it does absolutely no one any good. The object of one’s hate isn’t any worse off for it, but the hater often finds his own soul poisoned, life gray and grainy, nights sleepless, tension in the belly that just won’t go away, a whirling in the brain as he gets so caught up in the hate he forgets about all else in life, the good things. Revenge, that dish best served cold instead of hot. There might even be consequences of the hate—like an assault charge for any physical damage to the man or his property, or a libel suit for what may have been said or written about him. Such is the nature of retribution: Everyone gets splattered and no one wins.