This Post Means Nothing

Readers may have been surprised to find that Killing the Buddha did not feature a blog post about the nativity scene fracas in Santa Monica, wherein atheists acquired and used most of the traditional display spots to advertise their philosophy. This story was relevant to our area of coverage and to our audience. We could have easily written something about it.

But if you think about it, writing a blog post for a literary journal is ultimately a meaningless and futile endeavor. In the distant future, long after the servers hosting KtB have frozen on the lifeless surface of earth, and only remnants of our blog posts drift out into the cosmos, forever indecipherable and steadily weakening (not to mention totally out-of-context), the absurdity of our efforts here will becoming starkly clear.

Wait, you say. The absurdity against which we toil doesn’t understand the fires inside our chests. It doesn’t know that we’ll forever forge ahead in the face of certain doom, our sense of purpose impervious to disruption! In the absence of a meta-narrative bloggers can only seek to create a new one! Yes, we say. A new meta-narrative, one which will one day be eaten by the worms that eat our brains, and the brains of our children, and the brains of their children, until the worms are swallowed by the sun, and the sun dies, and all form dissolves at the unforgiving hand of entropy.

A blog post about atheists would have meant nothing to the cold, indifferent, and unstoppable forces that rule the world. Its existence would have formed a mere blip in the flow of cosmic time. Not only would it have been forgotten; all consciousness that could have remembered it would have eventually perished. Only a fool would have written such a post. His time would have been better spent eating Cup O’Noodles and surfing Facebook.