I do not know who they are. The woman’s expression is how I feel every day.
Nihilism: the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.
You love a good yard sale. Your friends from Brooklyn are coming up this weekend, and they CANNOT WAIT to rummage through someone’s brick-a-brack strewn across a lawn. Is this painting only $25? Could it be worth thousands? Millions?
You drive your friends to yard sales, estate sales and storage lot sales. Maybe you’ll find something so priceless, so amazing – an Eames chair for $50 or a vintage potholder. Who knows?
You’ve seen the TV shows. Could this turtle-shaped turin bowl be from the Civil War? How much could it be worth? You’re hoping for validation from some old historian. Yes, this is a turn-of-the century blah-di-blah worth $3,000 and you found it under an aluminum folding table for only $5!
Oh, the joys of upstate living! It’s a treasure hunt every weekend!
It’s fall and the Brooklynites keep coming. It’s yard sales and brunches and pumpkin-spiced-apple-everything in Columbia County!
Then it happens. While rummaging, you stumble across a box of ephemera. You dig deep, and under a stash of cassette tapes, you find a wedding album, baby pictures, and black and white photographs of family members with no names.
This box was someone’s life, or a family of lives. Somehow, this box is now sitting under a table at a yard sale. The box is troubling. The forgotten lives it holds is sad, deeply sad.
For a moment, you wonder, could this happen to me? Could my life be reduced to a box at a yard sale – just a box of photos that no one wants?
You try to forget about the box and the photos, but you can’t.
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The next day, you’re in Hudson with your friends from Brooklyn, waiting outside the restaurant for a table. Brunch will be coffee and fried baloney sandwiches.
Last night, you googled ‘Nietzsche’ and ‘Nihilism’, and began to wonder if human existence matters? Is there a God?
Your friends from Brooklyn are oblivious to your google searching and existential crisis. They are talking about some mid-century modern furniture they saw yesterday; meanwhile, you are falling down a meaningless rabbit hole of German and French mid-century philosophers.
By the time you get a table, you are browsing Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories on existentialism and free will. You ponder, if one can create a reason to exist, then yes, maybe there’s hope that your years on this earth will at least have a goal, if not purpose, beyond antiques and fried baloney.
Then again, if everything is meaningless, what am I worried about?
Waiting for the check, you download Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, hoping that it will inspire you to find a meaning in life.
You send the Brooklynites home on the Amtrak, ‘good-bye, kiss-kiss’, after spending the weekend with them endlessly looking at end tables.
Who knows when you’ll see them again – maybe never. Maybe tomorrow we will all turn into cockroaches.
Bobbi joined a New Wave band
“88 Lines about 44 Women” – The Nails
Changed her name to Bobbi Sox
Eloise, who played guitar
Sang songs about whales and cops
Terri didn’t give a sh*t
She was just a nihilist
Ronnie was much more my style
Cause she wrote songs just like this
Wow!