"...and then they all got run over by a truck."

The above is one of the two most-cited bad/cliche endings in amateur writing (the other being "...but it was all a dream!"). Most comments towards it do note that such an ending can be pulled off effectively in certain cases. (I would imagine one such case being if the story regarded how people respond to an alien, hostile, indifferent universe, or something along those lines... but most would say that's been done enough.)

The fact of the matter, of course, is that such endings happen all the time in real life. People die for random, mundane reasons, all the time. Take the bridge that collapsed in Minnesota a few days ago. Yes, there was a reason -- engineers and politicians and many other people were certainly be investigated and held at fault -- but for the people who died crossing a bridge they crossed every day, it was random, irrelevant to each of their personal stories. It just happened. Now seven people are dead.

I have long been fascinated by Campbell's Hero's Journey and mythic structure and, extending from that, the application of narrative onto life -- the idea that there is a prototypical story encoded into our brains that is simply the way we look at the world. And that's what makes this sort of thing so disturbing: we look at life and see stories, and we expect those stories to follow the constructs of narrative. Beginning, middle, end. And when life doesn't, when the universe reminds us that we aren't in a novel or a movie . . . something happens to us. I don't think we can really conceptualize that constant possibility of death -- Vonnegut got close in Slaughterhouse-Five, I think, but it's hard to tell whether that novel is endorsing or satirizing fatalism (which I like to think is because he himself couldn't commit one way or the other, but I don't presume to know what Vonnegut really meant.)

To be honest what prompted this post is that a friend of mine crossed that bridge about two minutes before it collapsed. I'm not particularly good friends with her -- we've actually only talked a few times, more ran in the same circle sort of thing -- but her telling me about it (in a very matter-of-fact way: "Hey, what's up?" "Nothing. You?" "I almost died today.") affected me in a way I don't remember feeling . . . ever. It's not just the knowing-someone-close-to-it-makes-it-closer deal (though that's certainly a part of it); I think the thing that was most disturbing is that this particular friend is very much a "character" -- a term I don't mean offensively, but that she is a unique person who seems more than most people to be living in a story (not like a fairy tale happy story, but a real dramatic story). I expect most people know someone like that -- who, unlike most of us, we can actually imagine dying, but in some horrible or dramatic way, "going out with a bang". The thought of her dying in a bridge collapse is so contrary to that idea, so mundane and stupid and random, that it really struck a chord with me. Life isn't a story.

Life isn't a story... but stories are about life. Isn't than an essential contradiction? Ignoring the stories that entertain or inform or persuade -- though those of course account for the vast majority of stories -- but the ones that "really mean something" (I think I'm channeling Sam Gamgee here) are . . . the phrasing is often, I think, "comment on the human condition". They're supposed to be real, true, reflections of life, all life. They're supposed to be universal. But . . . they're not. They can't be. Because real life is random and mundane and stupid. Real life is people struggling to attain something that can't be attained -- control? purpose? meaning?

We have to set goals for ourselves, give ourselves purpose. I accept that our ultimate purposes, our absolute ideals, cannot be achieved; but that thought is acceptable only with the knowledge that the lesser goals are. If we concede that those, too, are beyond our control . . . where are we? What are we? Are we are simply beings struggling against nothing towards nothing? I don't know what I'm saying now. This has scared me . . . more than I think I can fully realize. I don't know what this means. (But that's the natural human state, isn't it? Not knowing? Bitter laughter. Black humor is all I have left at this moment. Best lay it to rest, then.)