Across the Existential Bow

People have an almost religious need to believe this all means something—that there is a narrative arc, a moral ledger, a cosmic audience applauding or booing from the dark. They cling to memory, legacy, impact, as if existence were a performance graded after the curtain falls. This is sentimental accounting, nothing more. Strip away the slogans and affirmations and what remains is not purpose, but process: sensation, interpretation, extinction. No scorecards. No final applause. No cosmic memory palace preserving your outline. Just experience flickering briefly through a nervous system before it cuts to black, unrecorded, unredeemed, and ultimately irrelevant entirely.

With no witness, no residue, no echo, no correction, no appeal.

Life is ugly, dirty, and ultimately ALWAYS ends the same way. There are really no heroes or villains beyond who can and does define those terms—there are actions and consequences.

You can die in bed or be splatted by an eighteen-wheeler. Take a wrong turn and get creamed driving to the store. Or get plugged by a random lunatic out of the blue. No matter who you are, or think you are, the lights go out, and this “reality” vanishes.

How do you like that sh*t, huh?

Whether or not the “real” world continues or gets rolled up like a cheap rug is then rendered a moot point.

Some lunkheaded “Influencer” has suggested that it is a darned shame some people won’t be “remembered” for “ten seconds after they die.” I wonder what the hell he is on about.

What does it MATTER if you’re ultimately remembered or forgotten? If a radio plays in an empty room, with no one around to hear it, does it still make music? A moot point for the vanished, for the “dead.”

Here’s one more shot across the existential bow:

You only experience this “reality” through the Perceptor: the “Five Gates” of your sensory inputs. Everything you see, hear, taste, touch, smell—all of it electrical impulses decoded by the hypothalamus and imputed by the Perceptor as memory—an unreliable fount of half-remembered, perceptually edited jump cuts.

Nothing is real.

Everything is permitted.

But even if it is “real,” by whatever definition you measure that, it is still simply an illusory dream—an impermanent state of being in which, as your consciousness is cut off by death, you vanish as assuredly as the You I am addressing is a separate and distinct entity from my perception of You, of myself.

Ultimately, YOU—assuming there is a you distinct from me—are alone in your own skull. And only the Five Gates give you the appearance, the presentation of a light and life you have never actually seen, as the brain does not register light, or darkness.

Or even the closing of the Gates.

Every moment, moment by moment, is the future turning into the past, coiling like a snake across the neural landscape, accessed by the Perceptor as memory—an unreliable fount of half-remembered, perceptually edited jump cuts.

Nothing is real.

Everything is permitted.

But even if it is “real,” by whatever definition you measure that, it is still simply an illusory dream—an impermanent state of being in which, as your consciousness is cut off by death, you vanish as assuredly as the You I am addressing is a separate and distinct entity from my perception of You, of myself.

Ultimately, YOU—assuming there is a you distinct from me—are alone in your own skull. And only the Five Gates give you the appearance, the presentation of a light and life you have never actually seen, as the brain does not register light, or darkness.

Or even the closing of the Gates.

Author's website

Author's YouTube

Read my book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread by Tom Baker

\