chordae tendineae

I'm alone on a Saturday night. Several glasses of cherry-flavored vodka and cola have brought me here. I am here to provide an update about my current self. Things are not good. (Typical situation, right? Yeah, well, fuck you.) About ten days ago things began to slowly drift southward. Now I am here. At the bottom. My heart strings (anatomically known as the chordae tendineae) are heavy this late evening. Heavy because yesterday I spoke to mother, and her health hasn't improved; in fact, it has worsened, although she may finally be nearing a diagnosis. I have previously written, albeit briefly, about mother's ailing health, so I will not rehash the details. She's lost nearly 60 pounds since the onset of the illness last October. She believes she has found a name for the sickness that has left her unable to ingest practically anything. The condition is called gastroparesis, and it occurs when the muscles of the stomach fail to properly propel food into the small intestine. The food consumed goes nowhere and ostensibly rots in the stomach. Because there is no cure for gastroparesis, she may have to rely, possibly exclusively, on a feeding tube to deliver necessary nutrients. She will hopefully know more after she visits her doctor – the doctor who thus far has been unable to diagnose her illness – on April 12.

Me: I submitted my applications for the ______ and _____ ____ Registered Nursing Programs last week. Each program accepts 40 applicants, which are accepted on a 223-point-scoring system. I scored 212, so I should be a lock for at least one of the campuses. I should be excited about this potential development, but I am not. It's difficult to maintain a gasp of optimism when everything is suffocated by pessimism and dread. This hopelessness is frustratingly elusive, because when I attempt to define what drives it, I find nothing but a maze of fragmented ideologies, concepts that seem sensible but simultaneously have no foothold on my reality.

Is this contrast a result of the fact that life has no discernible purpose?

I have wrestled with nihilism for years, yet it remains. I still wait for the individual (and his accompanying religion) to convince me that our species has an irrefutable purpose. A beaver, for example, possesses an innate sense to construct a dam so that it may then build its lodge in the resulting pond. Are we stripped of sense and purpose because our consciousness floods our existence with questions? Yes. The beaver does not question his dam building activity because his survival depends on that activity. And what about us? Is our sole purpose survival? If so, then why is survival a relative question based on class and wealth? I could use this question as a vehicle to question capitalism, but the hour is late and my eyelids are heavy.

I'll close with this: I would like to believe that our purpose is simply survival – survival of the individual and his fellow man. But in this country and throughout the world, the system of capitalism dictates otherwise. As Karl Marx wrote in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III, "Production comes to a standstill not at the point where needs are satisfied, but rather where the production and realization of profit impose this."

Are we stripped of sense and purpose because our consciousness floods our existence with questions (and thereby motives)?

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