A new dawn

This morning marks a time point in which the path of my life has significantly branched from its intended course.  Like a feeble ocean vessel being diverted around turbulent seas by a seasoned captain, the news I heard earlier today has shifted my life onto an entirely unexpected route.  Unlike the ship, however, I'm not certain whether my life will ever again meet up with my original path; or whether I'll ultimately end my voyage at the same intended destination.

I would guess that most of us have experienced these moments in life at least once.  You're hit, almost cheap-shotted, by a piece of information that renders reality a much more fickle experience than previously believed.  "Cheap-shotted" may seem to suggest unpleasant and disturbing news, but I'd argue it's a fitting descriptor even for life's most exciting and uplifting happenings.  Regardless, learning about news like this throws one into a strange and distorted reality, where time seems to slow, yet thoughts and fleeting visions seem to dance and race.  A scene from Fight Club (of all movies; when Norton's character realizes he is Tyler Durden) visualizes these feelings best.  It's like our conscious awareness begins to shake and jitter, as if the reel of a movie film is jostling in the projector and everything on screen is skipping erratically.  You can almost feel your brain shaking, certain that the whirring reel is about to snap the film at any moment.

After a few minutes, or perhaps it was hours, when I thought this news had successfully "sunk in," I felt myself cyclone into a regression.  A regression that transformed me into something entirely unrecognizable to my former self.  Right then and there.  And right here and now, I'm continuing this day as a different person, a different animal, than who I started this day as.  Rational human thinking and behaving was destroyed in the storm and replaced instead with shambles of a babbling primal beast.  Ravaged in the winds of competing emotions, I'm reduced to a panting, red-eyed creature, capable only of obeying its most primitive needs.  Yet I must continue the day - the week - the coming months.

How can I be expected to understand this?  How can I be expected to deal with this?  How can I be expected to live through this and beyond this?  Perhaps these expectations are simply desert mirages of faulty hope; perhaps fate has no intention of letting me survive this.

In short, I feel as though every emotion I've ever had, every sensibility, belief, or expectation I've ever experienced, has today culminated into a single discrete time point, a nexus between all the extremities of human thinking and feeling.

That time point, that universal nexus, occurred earlier this morning... when I found out that Dunkin Donuts now sells K-cups, for use in Keurig coffee machines.  My life is now complete.  Dr. Cynicism runs on Dunkin, and don't you mother-fucking forget it people :-)