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In Crimes and Misdemeanors there’s a character who keeps saying, “Comedy is tragedy over time.” Someday you will look on the worst days you’ve ever had, and laugh. For now you can just describe it in comments under Perspective (the previous post) and try to cheer yourself up with the thought that there are people out there who make your life look like a wine and cheese picnic on George Clooney’s Lake Como estate. Which incidentally has been cited as one of the most polluted spots in Italy. Rewind to previous thought—is this one reason why people take up humanitarian causes (I’m not saying it’s the only reason)?

Quite often these days I feel like a hamster that’s been running and running and is about to fall off the wheel from sheer exhaustion, but knows that if it stops some schmuck will pick it up and stick it in a place that’s fun for the schmuck but not for the hamster, you know what I’m saying?

You, me, that table, this building, your office, the objects of your desires, your pets—at the subatomic level, we’re mostly empty space. As in Nothing. At the most, some teeny-weeny vibrating particles that vanish. It’s either wonderful or horrifying, depending on your state of mind. If you feel that you’re important, significant, a major player, ha! If you feel small, downtrodden, like a speck of excrement on a tissue floating in the ocean (misquote from Sideways quoting Bukowski), it’s kind of comforting.

“Everything is made of atoms.”

Here’s something to cheer everyone up (possibly at your expense, but think of it as an act of charity): Describe a spectacularly bad day you’ve had recently. Something so bad, you rejoiced when it ended. Post it in Comments. If you make us feel really sorry for you, I’ll send you a book. Which might make things worse, but hey, freebie!

From the Financial Times: “Michelangelo Antonioni, who has died aged 94, was the least Italianate of great Italian filmmakers. A glacial anatomist of love, despair and the alienating tropes of modern life, he seemed to come from another country and culture than the one inhabited by Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini and Bertolucci. Where they coloured their movies with human passion and extremes of style or emotional expression, Antonioni created a landscape and screen language where subtext, symbol and enigma reigned. . .”