It's Everywhere! Get Used To It!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Eastern Pacific Hurricane Season
Peace Officer Memorial Day
UN International Day of Families
San Isidoro Day (Mexico)
Independence Day (Paraguay)

 

My mom and I love Kobo Abe’s book The Woman In the Dunes. It’s a weird little surreal story with some plot that basically boils down to a guy who falls into a pit on a remote sandy beach. At the bottom of a pit lives a woman in a house.  She spends every night shoveling sand into buckets that are hauled away before the sand crushes her house.  It’s a futile, pointless task: the ultimate reward of a day spent shoveling sand is that you get to wake up the next day to shovel it back again. The damn sand never lets up. It just keeps coming, and all you can do is keep it from burying you.

 

We both think that’s a pretty good image for life itself.  Like completing the stuff on your to-do list.  There’s never a point where it lets up, because every time you shovel some items aside more start to encroach upon you.

 

Why do I bring this up now?

 

Oh, no reason.

 

*twitch*


Edit: Evidently this post can be interpreted two ways. No, I am not despairing about the futility of life, the universe, and everything.  What I meant to imply was that I'm very, very busy, and even though I keep getting things done, each accomplishment means six more things I gotta do. So all I'm saying is, I'm sure shoveling a lot of sand right now.

Comments

Abe!

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

The Face of Another is also good. And Kangaroo Notebook is...different. It's about a guy who wakes up to find that bean sprouts are growing from his pores, and ends up floating down a river in a gurney, encountering things like jellyfish that explode when they have sex.