call•me•jonah

It occured to Jonah midstride, halfway to the parking lot, hand on the unlock button, that he used to care so much about everything. Not in a sympathetic "I feel your pain" kind of way. More like every instant was imbued with a weight of uninteligible significance. A weight he bore directly on his scrawny shoulders. A weight which gave purpose and meaning to his introverted suffering, but offered little relief. Never did it offer to buy him ice cream and relax at a theater. Never did it provide answers, for always as he turned round and round it remained elusively on his back.

Significance never makes room for insignificance.

But these terms, are perhaps... retired.

It occured to him, as he sunk into the plush leather seats of the 2006 Acura LS, that he didn't care about anything anymore except laughing. Laughing not at humor, nor at irony, but at life itself. For everything, especially those deeply rooted, thick barked, long branched shade trees of purpose, on which he spent his youth swinging idly in epileptic fits of logical reasoning, wrestling privately with eternal truths, now seemed shaded with as many layers of absurdity as the absurdities it sought to revile. And this leveling of the playing field, this great misconception, if indeed it is a misconception, turns each tragedy into uprourious comedy. As the curtain pulls back it reveals each player as a clown unaware of his bright smile and shiny red nose. Unaware of his clumsiness and absurdity.

It is perhaps because he had reached absurd limits of seriousness, that he now finds himself in a wake of frivility. Having hotglued a cutout black-felt meanginfulness to everything he engaged, his church, his tennis shoes, his computer, his school, his books, his friends, his leisure, his food, his music, every footstep, every choice, this path or that path, each bite, each word, was either pointing in the right direction or the wrong direction. Everything was utterly and inescapably important. But without guidance and with wavering confidence, it was inevitable that this tower of significance would tumble. It is understandable that in it's wake, in the rubble and broken shards of past-meaning, now mixed homogenously with past-unmeaning, is awakened a fresh nihilism. A nihilism born not of rebellion nor apathy nor logic, but of a failed search for purpose. A search that reached towering proportions and imploded on its own absurdity.

Jonah has become an accidental nihilist. He is certain of the ultimate defeat of nihilism, if he ever finds the impetus to raise his sword against it. Nihilism he considers to be a purgatory, a gateway between the past life and the future life. The past life his withered, the future life has yet to be born, and so for now Jonah floats in an heterogenous compound of belief and unbelief, reason and unreason, and a will to imbue everything with emptyness.

If Jonah would stop smiling, nihilism would scare him. But his eggs are fried. And for now he's enjoying breakfast at a pitstop on the road to wherever.