I am not good at being alone.  I cannot turn off my brain.  It doesn’t like me; much in the way we stab at the earth that houses us, it poisons me from within, degrading the vessel that encapsulates it.

I am not special in being a victim of this disdain, however.  It doesn’t like you much, either.  Any of you.  Most of the time, anyway.  It actually tolerates you on an individual basis rather well, but when you band together and think with one mind, it hurts its core.

I have been thinking in terms of physics and metaphysics, in terms of light and fog, of perception and reception.  “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”  If we cannot ponder such things as eternity or infinity, how can we wrap our heads around the finer insinuations of a definite or timed existence?  That question we ask: what happens to us when we die?  When the spark in my brain goes out, what becomes of the thoughts and memories it fueled?  And where does the spark go?  It boggles the mind to imagine the nothingness that must be death.  One minute, all the thoughts and feelings and love and pain of breathing; then, nothing.  The film stops, and even the screen blinks out of existence.  We are nothing.

Of course, we live in the memory of others, but eventually even they will also blink out of being.  Were we to tweak just a few lessons here and there, burn a painting or two, we can make any “immortal” figure disappear.  With our own vessel of knowledge, we may choose to include or omit whatever we desire.  What if I wanted to imagine a world without George Washington, or Albert Einstein, or Jesus Christ?  What if I made a world without death?

I watched a spider wander around my stoop the other day, and I felt a fear towards it that made me want to kill it.  It was almost instinct, but I slowed the impulse down enough to imagine why.  What threat does the spider represent, immediately?  It is not bigger than me; rather I am several thousand times its size.  It is not more intelligent than me, so it’s unlikely that it will manipulate me into harming myself or lure me into financial ruin through a real estate scheme.  Looking at this spider, with my subconscious mind screaming at me to kill it, I had to wonder what about it fostered this fear.  I realized that it is my knowledge of the spider that makes me fear it.  I possess a mind which has a dossier on the spider and reminds me that it is poisonous, it can and likely will bite me and cause me discomfort.  It feasts on other creatures, it has eight menacing eyes, terrifying mandibles, and eight legs.  Given the chance, this spider will hurt me, so I should hurt it first.  And to a creature of my size and supposed dominance, to hurt is to kill.  In fact, it seems barbaric to hurt a creature so much smaller than me without killing it.  It seems natural to kill it; to cripple it would seem cruel, deliberate.  To hold a flame to its side and watch it sizzle, pulling away before the point of death, is the precise definition of torture.  No, the only defensive action I could take in good conscience would be to kill it.

Of course, after it had given me an opportunity to journey down that rabbit-hole slide that resides so often unused in my mind, I couldn’t rightly kill it.  So I rose and went about my business, my brain already churning in the machinations of thought that brought me to my next conclusion:

Based on what I know of humanity, of human beings, it only makes sense that if there is something larger than us out there, with any modicum of intelligence, it would arrive at the conclusion, every single time, to kill us.  Knowing this, it stands to reason that there can be no God.  If there is a God, and He is the omnipotent and omnipresent being of which we’ve been taught, He would have smote all of humanity long ago.  Or He just doesn’t care, which is also a pretty plausible scenario.

And that’s what I think about when I look at the menacing spiders nesting on the steps outside my apartment.  I do enjoy watching them go about their business, though, and I wonder what they think of me.  Do they recognize me as a lifeform or am I just another structure to be climbed?  Can they smell my flesh?  Does it make them hungry?  What will we, insignificant spiders that we are, think of God when we see Him?  Will we smell His flesh, and will it make us hungry?  Will we bite Him, poison Him, cause Him discomfort?  Or has He been here this whole time, and we just thought He was another part of the furniture?