To What End

In the warp and weft of your non-reading and writing lives, which is to say the greater universe of reality, you tend to regard a given outcome as the completion of an event, a task, perhaps even a life cycle. To these completions, you often attach a degree of feeling and consideration in what seems to you a commensurate degree of regard. 

Will you, for instance, feel pangs of regret for the last batch of asters and iris you discarded this past Sunday? Not likely because your Sunday trip to the grocer allowed you to replace those now sagging flowers with more vibrant avatars.

And so, as Kurt Vonnegut was so fond of saying, it goes. You light those memorial candles from the culture into which you were born (the yahrzeit or year anniversary of a death) for both parents, a sister, and a wife, doing so with a nod to the culture but a greater nod to the individuals. 

You would not be excommunicated nor reinvested into your birth culture, were you not to light such memorial candles, thus the argument that your rituals are more for you and the individual loads of grief you carry for each individual.

You also light candles for three remarkable companions along what Dante Alagheri referred to in metaphor as the road of life, Sam, Molly, and Sally, respectively a shorthair domestic cat, a multicultural dog, and a half-Australian Cattle Dog, half Australian shepherd, actual rituals to supplement the thoughts you carry of each.

Such behavior distinguishes you, distinctions you have come to understand you require to the same degree you are reminded of your six-foot-three-inch height, your dominant right-handedness, and the facts of your bionic nature, wherein you have neither hip you were born with nor, indeed, neither lens of each eye, nor, in fact the bladder.

These replacements are accommodations and outcomes; you did not on the spur of the moment, decide to have your hips or lenses or bladder replaced. Having sufficient time to learn and insure yourself to the probable outcomes of the greater universe of reality into which you were born, you learned to maneuver and adjust to the laws of observable and, on great occasion, unobservable probability.

The stories you read and write have a collateral set of outcomes, most of which you are able to chose as a matter of preference, but also from the same sort of observation and accommodations required of you out in the greater universe of reality. 

You are aware of the need for an outcome in a story, in fact feel cheated if a narrative you read does not have one, and within the same equation, you feel discomfited when you cannot see a way out of a narrative you've begun.

You are not so much looking for a happy ending as an instructive one, which, like it or not, is based on your experiences with the GUR, the greater universe of reality. On a number of occasions, you've reached the formula that guides you in your preferences for reading and your own writing--the negotiated settlement with the universe of reality.

Do you want a happy ending? Fuck, no. Happy endings represent to you some attempt on your part to control the entirety of the greater universe of reality, where you have enough to do keeping yourself afloat within it and aware of its many unspeakable beauties which you, nevertheless are at pains to recognize and evoke, both within your life and your work.

Thus your attraction to the noir, the sad humor of reality, the awareness of how, no matter their external attractive colors and splotchy bold patterns, the goddamned pears at Gelson's Market are always a disappointment from the first bite.

Endings reflect individual nature. Who ever heard of lighting a yahrzeit candle for a cat or dog? You know with a noir-like certainty that the pears at Gelson's Market have not seen the last of you. Endings reflect the you, trying to effect an outcome in a greater world of reality that does not give a rat's ass because it is too busy being itself.