Frank Close talks about nothing

[midcan5]

'Seinfeld' presumes to be a show about 'nothing' in which the characters try to sell a show about 'nothing' to the broadcast executives. In reality the show is about everything, as they cover almost every topic imaginable, usually with irony and amusing caricature. And just like Seinfeld's attempt at nothing any examination of the universe reveals something. Nothing, like so many abstract terms has no concrete meaning outside of our use of it. But we humans who live, have a different sense of nothing as a moment before an act of passion we were not and a moment after consciousness leaves we are not. Life is so interesting and yet temporary. So with those positive thoughts on this day when someone stole an hour from my life I close.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAy9bGIuXR0[/ame]
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osXDyXzFor0]YouTube - Why there is something rather than nothing...[/ame]

"Imagine for a moment your parents had been interrupted. Suppose someone had shone a flashlight in the backseat of the car you were conceived in, you would not exist. A knock at a door. Some interruption. If only a few seconds passed a different sperm would have meant a different person and you as you exist now would never have been."

http://www.usmessageboard.com/writing/50677-life-chance-eternity.html

 

[midcan5]

'Shrapnel'

"I'm driving to work with Bruce Springsteen
screaming and my hands become smaller,
ten years old, knuckles swollen from cracking,
and I hear again my mother in the kitchen,
calling my father a drunk, a sick bastard
and a drunk. I open my door enough to see
her shoulders pinned to the brindled linoleum,
but when I shout his name he returns
to the table, to his half-eaten sandwich
and beer, and calls me to sit with him
in the sink light's fluorescent glow.
He tells me his first wife got pregnant
by a skinny Italian, and that his eyes
are bloodshot from tears, not beer,
then makes my right hand almost
invisible within his as he presses
my fingers into the shrapnel wounds
on his neck to show me just how close
I'd come to never being born. "

Daniel Donaghy