Today’s Break in the Month of November Has Been Brought to You by…

Now that I have you’re attention, and poured my next cup of it’s barely still morning coffee, while at the same time re-re-re-re-rerere-watching that Kaiju Classic, War of the Gargantuas on PlutoTV, I’ve concluded that this is a no poetry today kinda day.

Albert Camus, in his book The Myth of Sisyphus, wrote, “I do not know whether or not this world has a meaning which transcends it”.

Damn.

See, a couple of times already this month, I’ve experienced what I will call… because it sounds way cooler… “Existential Gaps” in my bloggy output. The first lasting three days, the other, four. Each of these gaps was closed by a kind of controlled manic episode, akin to something lots of people fall into when they fully grasp that guests are on their way, and nobody has cleaned the kitchen stove, or the bathroom toilet, in weeks. So they end up two-fisting all the cleaning supplies and turn everything soiled into spotless, just in time for their guests to walk, smiling, through the front door, and into the cloud of Comet, Windex, and Dow Scrubbing Bubbles, hanging in the air that surrounds them.

My reason for these November gaps, and the mania that closed them, was a combination of a simple, week-long common cold, and the intermittent affliction Camus wrote about, that comes in the form of…

(Okay, War of the Gargantuas is over. Now it’s time to make soup and watch the end of another treatise on fictional existential realities, Good Will Hunting)

…I don’t know, a glitch in momentum? Like, not wanting to make a big deal out of a sore throat and clogged sinuses when thirty-something percent of my immediate friends suffer from debilitating chronic illnesses? Or yeah, maybe it’s that I still haven’t fully come to grips with whether or not Camus was right, or if giving a shit that you complete 30 days of blogging at this time in human history even matters, when most of us are hoping that what we do today matter when we’re gone.

So will it? Will it matter?

If by transcendent, you mean will what I do here echo in some non-corporeal ether, because something I did in this life had a component of righteous efficacy? Well, that’s a HELL NO. Did I used to believe that? Yes. In fact, I used to TEACH that, although you’re only ever gonna get the full story out of me with offers of cheesecake, bourbon, and a puppy. But if by transcendent, you mean will what I do here, or say here, echo in the hearts and minds of those to whom I did the doing or the saying? If THAT’S what you mean, that’s a HELL YES.

And just so you know, I love Albert Camus almost as much as I love cheesecake, bourbon, puppies, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Kaiju movies, and nailing the answer to the Final Jeopardy! clue, every night, Monday through Friday at 7:23 pm, by the grace of some nebulous god, my great big brain, and the lickable corner store temporary stamp tattoos, chock full of so much timed-release LSD my tiny ten-year-old self ingested that, to this day, I can still remember things I’m not even sure I ever learned, as long as you give me thirty seconds, and hum the Final Jeopardy! jingle.

And yet, I still haven’t memorized a single one of my old poems.

Anyway, for a day that started out pretty bleak, what with the existential dread and all, I feel better now, so there’s that. And maybe going forward, I’ll think a little differently about transcendence. Also, if you’ve got cheesecake, bourbon, and a puppy, have I got a story for you.

Talk to you tomorrow.