Damn. I Am Now In Exestential Crisis Mode.

Damn. I am now in exestential crisis mode.

A few years ago, I went back to visit my childhood home. Boredom called, and I decided to drown it out by using some tactically applied high-RPM until I arrived at the location. This house is a lot different now, in both subtle and dramatic ways. Obviously, there's a different family living in it. The lawn is a little bit better kept, after my dad's heroin-chic attempts at re-wilding have been knocked down by a more conventional suburbanite approach. And Coco is gone.

Coco is the neighbour's dog. Or he was. Despite being a small, black puffball, he would bark furiously at me whenever I came out into the yard. Dogs don't live nearly long enough, and presumably at some point between when I left and when I returned, he passed onto the great hereafter, barking at an infinite expanse of angels for perceived injustices against dog-kind. In his place was another small, black puffball.

This new dog, who I was not lucky enough to get the name of, also barked furiously at me upon my approach to the property. Coco's successor was performing the same job, in the same spot, with the same asshole attitude, decades later, totally unaware of his predecessor's impressive body of work on this exact file, or even his presence on this cursed Earth. I started to feel a little woozy at the existential rush that contemplating this produced, and quickly returned to my car, where I purged the nitrous oxide a few times until I felt better.

That dog was lucky, in a lot of ways. He didn't have to think about leaving a legacy for the future, and could just focus on perfecting the art of yipping furiously at my presence. All dogs want the same thing, as long as they're put in that yard, and are small yappy creatures. Maybe humans are the ones that fucked it up, I ruminate as I slot the compressed-air shifter into the next gear in order to finally cease the several-minutes-long burnout that I had been doing in front of his house to really work his barky ass up.