Nihilism #2

Listen to this song, "Allison Johnson," one of my favorites from Portland band Richmond Fontaine's Post to Wire (2004) album, and its elegiac, boyish faith in an ultimate feminine companionship. This song, I think, is a perfect succinct statement of the romantic worldview:

Allison Johnson Allison Johnson

I won't let you down 

I'll find us a house on Wilson Street and
Our kids will play in the yard and at
Night the cottonwood trees they will
Sway to the music that we play 

Allison Johnson don't fade on me 

Our clothes lay intertwined
On the floor together and we could sleep all day
Stay in bed all day

This song shuffled on this morning as I sat at my PC preparing a post on Ukraine. And I was struck by the extent to which this romantic worldview governed my actions throughout my adult life -- this fiction of a final resting place of peace and bliss and contentment and repose that was not death but rather bedding down with a beloved female partner.

See, that is not going to happen. Nihilism is the acceptance that you can't sleep in bed all day, stay in bed all day with your lady, with your god, with your mommy, with whomever, with your clothes on the floor intertwined. Allison Johnson is a fiction, a projection of the boy's mind looking for nothingness but not knowing it. Realizing this, this is nihilism.