Something has happened. It is something so exquisitely exasperating and ironic given my current position and the life lessons I need to learn that I have snapped from atheist to believer in a cruel and vengeful deity in the span of one day. Okay, perhaps the deity is not cruel and vengeful; perhaps it is loving and omniscient and knows precisely when to insert these little bombshells for maximum positive effect. Who knows? That’s the problem with theism: you just don’t know, so you have to be open to everything, and then Pat Robertson comes along and makes these monumentally stupid claims, and they don’t throw him in the lunatic asylum because, hey, he just might be on to something.

So anyway, now I have to deal with this thing that has happened, and it’s not really this thing, but a lifetime full of things for which this thing was prototypal back when I first encountered it and now that it is happening again serves as icing on the cake. It seems inconceivable that I could confront it (or not confront it) on the level of the thing itself, for the thing was all consuming even before serving as framework for how I deal with subsequent things, and it has been mythologized over a period of decades. This thing, now, gives me the opportunity to be heartless and self-protective, which I have tried before and doesn’t work the way it does in the movies, or kind and extremely vulnerable to destruction. Given my personality and the nature of the thing in question, there is no middle ground: while imposed boundaries may have some effect on the thing itself, they do not contain the reflexes of my soul.

In other words, the deity is now forcing my hand, using this thing that has happened to make me decide what my priorities are and what kind of person I want to be. People always seem to regret self-protective heartlessness on their deathbeds, but these are the same people whose occasional self-protective heartlessness has led to accomplishments that will live on when they’re gone.