A Garden Savage

ARM

My Roommate’s cat Dixie is rolling around the floor of my room very enthusiastically. I have a mild, dull headache on the right side of my head. I’m sitting cross legged in my bed, drinking a Coors Light at 8:30 in the evening. Elsewhere in the house, dog’s nails tap across the kitchen floor, and the cat has knocked a few things off my shelf on the way up to the top of my bookcase.

Today was not a good day. It was a real low after an otherwise beautiful weekend.

So much of what goes wrong in life is attributed to the enemy: the devil, the racial minority, the racial majority, a religion or lack of religion, capitalism, communism; —there are so many enemies.

But so much of life’s cruelty is just life, nothing more than Nature being herself. She has never understood justice; it is a game her children play.

The default state of things is cruelty and unfairness. The rich get richer; the powerful gain more power; the blessed become more blessed. It has always been that way. That’s life.

When asked what he thought about life, the ghost said: They were all flowers in a garden savage.

I looked at the garden. It was behind high walls. No one had entered for many years. The flowers, left to their own devices, grew teeth. And the trees threw fistfuls of pollen and seeds over the wall.

I’m sorry. I’m sure there are good things in the world. But life as a whole seems cruel. It always ends in death, and all love is tragedy.

Nature takes the fittest and rewards the very best disproportionately.

Who is fittest? —No one knows. Nature is capricious. She’ll change her mind from one day to the next.

People think that if it wasn’t for the enemy that things would be fair.

No. Life breeds cruelty.

There is kindness and generosity in the world. If you find it, be thankful. It is a mystery.