A Thirty Second Tale of Life and Death

The fact that I am delirious with fever should in no way detract from the value of this short, little tale.

I was sitting on the porch today, trying to cool down. My love tells me that I have incredible peripheral vision. I suppose I do. In any event, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that a small wasp/hornet had landed on my favorite, pinhead-sized, yellow spider's web. I watched as it twitched, spun its belly on an e-string thorax, and I assumed that it was done for. My tiny, yellow spider thought so too, and sprung into wrapping and desiccating action. As you know, all spiders have teeth, and my little yellow friend had hers plunged into the wasp's head. The wasp appeared to go limp, lifeless I thought, when it jabbed my little spider, and the battle renewed, but only briefly. With the new found strength of impending victory, the wasp did her in, freed himself, and carried her off to dine.

As delirious people do, I found myself absorbed, and reminded, of a newly acquired quote, "If you're in a hole, stop digging". I also found myself understanding the song title 'It takes a lot to laugh. It takes a train to cry', but that's for another day.

No today I am absorbed with struggles, and I'm trying to figure out if we (jews included) really do have crosses to bear. I think the answer is not so simple, but I am starting to believe that the super glue we crave is made from sugar and sympathy. We have such an obsession with self labeling; we want to self label to join similarly self labeled humans in sugar and sympathy labeled groups. I will not single out any group in particular, but know that it does include all religions, political dogmas, income levels, survivors and victims alike. It has something to do with shared experiences, but this alone makes it appear silly to me. I mean, don't we all share the same experience. There is certainly variance in experiences, but the variations do not separate people from the overall experience. No, belonging to churches, or political parties, or support groups only offers the chance to live in a hole with other people, and to dig until the water's over your heads.

There are, of course, other kinds of holes. Somewhere, I'm not sure where, but it's either in a land where they mutilate vaginas and sew them shut or, in a land where young boys are the primary saleable commodity, people insert larger and larger metal rings in their earlobes until their earlobes hang at roughly the same latitude as their navels. At some point today, I was amused by the possibility that these enlarged earlobes enabled people to hear what the dormant parts of their brains were trying to tell them, but instead, I was led to ponder the brass ring, longneck ladies of southeast asia. I discovered that this was done originally so that tigers would have greater difficulty snapping their necks, but I was left with the conclusion that it has more to do with sexual allure. In any event, it is a more concrete example of how we support our heads at the top of deeper holes we create. This, in turn, led me to ponder another old expression, "one man's penis is another man's doorknob".

In any event, we dig holes for lots of different reasons. Sometimes to find stuff that we perceive as valuable, sometimes to hide; sometimes we dig holes for other people, even nations; sometimes we dig them to steal; sometimes to bond. Go ahead and make up your own reasons, but I am left with only one conclusion.

Holes are empty places, not so much on their own, but more the result of our actions. They are no so much the creation of nothing as much as they are the absence of something. We dig holes, most often, because we believe something has been taken from us, or lost. But all holes are like black holes. They may suck in what we seek, but they leave it just out of reach, just beyond the event horizon.

There is hope however. Eventually, we will have dug so many holes, that they will join together, coagulate into a single giant hole, and we will be left to evolve out of it. But we are going to have to survive slightly longer than my little spider friend.