Instant Karma's Gonna Get You

This has nothing to do with my sci-fi "novel" and is more in line with the sorts of things that usually appear in this space.

For the longest time, I never used to believe in karma; I always thought it was one of those stupid concepts that was really no different from the ends to which people often use a belief in Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, or the FSM - just another means of social control through application of the supernatural. Think about it. If Jesus is your homeboy, then you don't want to be a jackass (for the Christian version of jackassery) out of some level of fear of eternal damnation in a lake of fire. Same thing if you're down with Allah (it's the same hell). Karma, I thought, was the pagan^[1] version of Hell, and no less imaginary.

However, as I was standing in my kitchen earlier today waiting for my frozen waffles to reach an edible state of warmth, I thought about something: what R did to me wasn't that different from what I did to TC. One might say that there is important distinction here, in that TC and I were never in what I would have defined as a 'relationship' - she was not my girlfriend and I was not her boyfriend, or at least I didn't see it that way. Yet if I look at the major elements of each situation, some of the parallels are striking:

• News delivered via text message.
• Reasons given completely nonsensical.
• No warning that the shitstorm was coming.
• No opportunity and no attempt to try to work things out.
• Recipient of said news entirely befuddled.
• The parties attempted to be friends afterwards, with degrees of success that are still TBD.

I said at the beginning of this post that I never used to believe in karma, and it wasn't the revelation from this afternoon that changed my mind; that particular switch was flipped almost 12 years ago - but as somebody who actually thinks there might be something to the whole karma business, it's easy to cast this in the light of the universe deciding to kick me in the Balzac as a means of retribution and re-education for a shitty thing I did back in March.

Is that actually what's going on here? I have no idea, and there would be no way to ever prove or disprove it regardless, but it does provide a lens that removes a large chunk of the emotional component of my breakup with R. If I chalk it up to karma and the universe trying to teach me a lesson, that's actionable information, and it's considerably more palatable than the alternative explanations that are all too easy to entertain but don't end with anything positive, most of which inevitably return to something along the lines of "R actually had very little regard for our relationship and didn't think it was even worth trying to work things out." (It is sort of hard to escape that one, karma or no karma, because that's really the conclusion that the facts point to, but at least if we put a little karma sauce in there, the sting isn't so bad.)

I dunno. It annoys me to no end that the termination of a relationship which was only a few months long is still figuring this prominently in my thought processes. Maybe it's because I still like her, even though much of my brain says "DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!^[2]" just as other parts of said brain still believe in dreaming the impossible dream. I think my monkey brain and my reptilian hindbrain need to get together and go all Jurassic on any neurons that insist on making pilgrimages to fantasyland.

I think I can start by not writing about it anymore. There are plenty of other things floating around in my head, and I've got a bunch of new story elements brewing up for Schrodinger's Universe anyway.