Kevorkian, pointlessness & red spiders
True believers seem to think that if you're an atheist, your life is pointless. In fact, if you google "my life is pointless" it will bring you to many religious sites.  I wonder whether there is any thought for the agnostic or borderline agnostic.  I'd like to put myself in that category.  I'm one of those people who is just too idle to go looking for God and would rather have a thunderbolt hit me as I sit in my chair, poring over my computer screen, wondering why the Drudge Report has no new headlines, and zapowbangwhizz change my life.  I am always searching for little miracles it seems.  Today I found an orange spider, and it stayed for a while on the table next to me, while I searched the web, determined to discover that it was a new species, thus far undiscovered.  It had six beady little eyes that watched me as I tried to get my computer close enough to photograph it and its terracotta orange body twitched when I got too near.  I suppose if you have six eyes your vision is pretty acute.  The children are in my bed, watching a movie.  I think it's Harold and Maude or the Inside Man.  I am so exhausted by their being sick.  The moment I get my head down to do any serious work, one of them needs me, needs something, some medicine, some water, a book, some food, a hand with homework, to show me a game on Millsberry.   I've discovered that the excitement of the first draft has dissipated and second and third drafts are just f-ing boring and dull.  It's sweet that they want to be together in their sick state, very sweet. If I lean forward from my chair under the awning I can just see them through the window, propped up on white pillows, with laptops and chocolate with hazlenuts which I'm sure is by now smeared all over my sheets.  It's so nice and smug to be a true believer, to be so sure that everyone else's life is pointless but your own.  Certainty is a great comfort to be sure.  I like the magic of not really knowing though.  I like the little magical things that are revealed in everyday life, the coincidences and surprise meetings, and the poetry in the trees, the sounds of the birds and the barking dog and the children at Wonderland School, whose voices echo through the canyon, and behind those sounds, the distant hum of traffic on Laurel, the gentle snoring of my old black dog, whose each breath sounds like yoga breathing.  The thump thumpety thump of the other dog's tail against the chair I'm sitting in.  The flax is growing enormous on the hillside and producing monster purple asparagus.  The sage green licorice has been cut back so it no longer resembles kudzu, and now the roses are popping through, with their healthy apple-red new leaves.  The neighbor at the top of the road has taken down his barbed wire I noticed.  I wonder if that means Nina is gone.  I hope she has gone somewhere safe.  Giles always talked about things being pointless.  I don't know why I associate that expression with him. Perhaps now that he is a ritzy gallery owner his vocabulary stretches further into optimistic salesman territory and he can pick more carefully how his adjectives color his life. ("Mamma, I'm kinda hungry, do you mind if I have a little bit of rice puding?" "No, please do").  If there isn't a point, then what is there?  The actor fretting and strutting?  It's a sad way to look at it.  I heard on the radio that Dr Kevorkian said to his first patient, Janet Atkins, as she ended her life, "Have a good trip."  The interviewer, Don Gonyea, asked him if he felt like Dr Frankenstein.  Kevorkian asked the interviewer in turn whether he had read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein lately.  He nodded that he had, and Kevorkian leaned in towards him and said in a low voice "Then you know that Frankenstein wasn't the monster, society was the monster."  The interview confessed to feeling a bit of a chill up his spine.