Pink Baby, Just In From The Void

If you add the word, "mercilessly" to some banal sentences, it can really spice-up some conversations. For example, "Would you mind mercilessly walking the dog?" Or, "Walgreen's is mercilessly out of 'Peeps'."

A dear friend of mine recently shared some baby pictures with me. They weren't of her baby, but of the infant daughter of a mutual acquaintance. When I saw the pictures of new life I was emotionally and intellectually compelled to thoughtfully consider the creation of new life. After a few minutes, I wrote something back to my friend that summed-up how I felt, "It's challenging to be an existential nihilist when looking at baby pictures like that, but I can report that it is possible."

You have to be a bit of a douce-bag to say something like that, but I wasn't trying to be malicious. From my point of view, it was a lovely thing to say, given how rarely I am challenged in my nihilism. Only something magnificent could give me pause about some of the conclusions I've come to over the years about the meaning of existence.

That said, the absurdity of the whole production was very much on my mind. Life, while devoid of any objective purpose, tenaciously makes new life. Well, there you have it, the only detectable purpose in nature is to make more life. Wet, stinking life.

Unfortunately, if you try to find purpose beyond that biological impulse you are left staring at the abyss. So all that new human life needs a pipe-dream, as O'Neill would have it. It's no wonder that Hollywood and religion do so well. They are selling distraction.

There is no god, of that I'm sure. At least not a god to all of us. We have to invent one that can fit our unique needs. Sometimes it's a woman, or a friend, or an ideal. Anything will do, so long as it keeps you out of your head. Having children is that sort of dream. Perhaps being a parent is a celebration of the illusion that we will never die. We all celebrate that illusion every day, in much of what we do, but breeders really embrace the biological imperitive to procreate as their way to distract themselves. To avoid facing what we are all trying to avoid facing, and that is the knowledge that, in the end, we're destined for nothingness.

It's hard to worry about how clean your toilet bowl is when you have that on your mind.