Wait for it…

"No American has died of old age since 1951." - DISCOVER magazine

Perhaps we just have to wait a little longer?

This strikes me as an odd statistic because I gather it implies that there is a clear distinction between death from 'old age' and that of organ failure (or any another possible result of a body weakened from simply the state of being old.)

As though there's a metaphysical hour glass that ticks down our time within a precise limit. It's as though there's a cosmic 'best before' date for each one of us. The hour strikes, the pin is pulled and like air out of a balloon our body deflates from loss of spirit.

It reminds me of a joke from Steven Wright:

"My friend goes, “Oh, those people are going to die instantly.” Well, everybody dies instantly. It’s the only way you can die. You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive, then you’re dead. He says, “There not going to die of natural causes.” I said, “They’re getting hit by a train. Naturally, they’re gonna die.”

Death itself is binary. Either you 1 are a 0. Religion, well that adds '2' into the options.

The colorful and even clinical methods to describe death are methods of pushing it further back along the line of 'stuff we don't know'. Keeping it mysterious means we can keep it a fairy tale. Only the bad guys lose. And it's not so bad, really. I hear kittens are involved and you get All-You-Can-Eat Ice-Cream. Unicorns, somehow they fit in too.

Personally, I think the aforementioned statistic merely denotes when they stopped some easy answers and started noticing they could go into detail. Perhaps expanding on what we know of a this great amusement park in the sky on which we must all some day catch a ride.

And we better act fast. I won a free Season's Pass and it expires in the fall. I think…

Where Be Dragons?

The last time I was at a Brick-n-Mortar bookstore I was in to browse the shelves for inspiration. Personally, I find the various titles on the covers to be a long, bemusing poem.

I see myself to as one of the DIY denizens. I prefer to immediately try to hack the layout logistics behind the store. I try plotting the X Y co-ordinates within my primal brain's spacial memory. It's about the skilled hunt by use of the old tools from a by-gone era. An ancient world that only saw Google as a misty star on the morning horizon.

I brave these dense worlds of dried, dead-tree forests not as a form of machismo, but as one of final conquest. The last untamed worlds are those that can be created inside our minds. These newly found books take hold in the soil and grow the gnarled jungles of imagination. I trek on not merely for the glossy periodicals and sandal-wood candles, but for a fertile ground to gather crop for my future.

For I like big books; that I cannot lie.

Mouse Trap

Something needs to change.

Either I need to learn to relax or find some sort of big-person chew toy to occupy my tense jaw as I get visibly irate more and more lately.

For example, a friend had been borrowing use of my Mac recently. He's a Mac user himself so he is well versed in the verbiage of the operating system. However, I also own the obfuscated brain-fart known as the "Mighty Mouse". This devise is admittedly a spiteful compromise between the one-button Apple dogma and the multi-button crowd.

He repeatedly called to action the various nonsense enacted by this mouse. Windows would scurry or fly away as he tried to click on them. Secret hidden gems of applications flew to the fore front when none were requested.

A failure of the product reflected poorly on me and my machine. It seemed somehow obtuse and inferior; creating haywire antics from an otherwise highly advance computer. It was HAL's toe-headed cousin drunkenly vomiting up utter chaos onto the desktop.

Personally, I like the mouse. Nevertheless, like a dead-squirrel toupee, it embarrasses me when we're together in public.

From now on, I'll just lug out the old standard USB mouse when anyone comes by to use my machine. Its' ugly, tangled cord in the throws of complete defiance of form, function, and the future itself.