Waxing Eloquent ... or not

Well I was really counting on my camera phone for a couple interesting pics of this trip but it seems that I am in a "dark spot" - very weak signal for phone calls and there is added roaming charges and no support for picture or text messaging. So much for emailing myself pics from my phone & then posting them on the blog. So the post about the trip (with the pics) will have to wait until I return to "civilization" ;-)

WARNING:The rest of this post might bring you down, so if you're already bummed out, you can bail now and nobody's feelings will be hurt. (Black ball on the flag - enter at your own risk)

Reading Sophie's World has not been going nearly as quickly as I thought it would. Its not because the book is obtuse or anything (or whatever fancy word you want to use for "hard to read") because it isn't hard to read. This book is very easy to read. Its very engaging. That is precisely the problem. Its so fascinating that, even though I was quite a few chapters in to the book, I started over and started taking notes. This shouldn't have surprised me - after all, the main character is engaged in a "study" of sorts. The thing that surprised me is how well the simple questions offered to the main character got me to thinking about "life, the universe and everything" (hey, that would make a good book title ... i know, i know - i'm kidding :-)

This afternoon I was talking with two friends. About an hour before the conversation, one of them had Tragedy slap her right in the face. Since both of these friends are a few years older than me, I took advantage of the opportunity to keep my mouth shut and just listen. (don't anybody faint - i can shutup on occasion :-)

Because of the particular shock that my friend received today, the conversation quickly turned to death, dying and how we deal with it. In the course of conversation she said "...its not that I'm afraid of dying - I'm Not! It's just that I'm not ready to die yet - there are still things that I want to do."

Naturally this got me thinking. (remember, i was keeping my mouth shut) Does anybody ever say "Okay, I got the last thing on the list done. Now I'm ready to die."? I know we use the hackneyed phrase "now I can die a happy man" after we get some nice thing or accomplish a goal but I seriously don't think anybody actually means it.

My own opinion is that each person's final curtain rings down in one of two ways. Either you live your life full of expectations (ironically, these would be the folks who are said to be "living each day as if it were their last") or you just mark time. From what I know of people, I think that everybody, with One noteable exception, has gone through periods of "marking time" in their life. I know that I have. This whole line of thinking gets into Fate, etc because someone will say "Suicides decided they were done, so they left" (in my nonprofessional opinion I believe that is Grossly Incorrect, but I have heard that argument made). I can't speak much to this subject, but I know of no suicide that left earth in their right mind (I don't believe that hemlock affects that statement but I won't argue that now). All of this is because of my belief that, no matter how grim the situation appears, while there is life there is still hope and suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But I digress...

Dying is a natural consequence of conception. We live in what I like to call a "hundred year universe". A hundred years from now you and most likely everybody that you know, will be dead. Life is for the living... (I'm still looking for that "special" bookcase but, even if I can find it, my wife probably won't let me bring it into the house :-)

Now it seems strange to me that yesterday, on a lark, my friends and I toured the local cemetery to look at the old gravestones. Of course we could not know what would happen today. Odd, isn't it, how sometimes the juxtaposition of events makes for morbidly comic moments?

more later,
B B