Only two hermits remain. The ninth hermit has been joined by a tenth. They live on a small ranch in Central Texas with The Dogs of Hermits’ Rest. He does not hang out in bars anywhere near as much as when he was trying to be Li Po.
Other than family and music and song writing, his interests include writing. He has authored many technical tomes, several short stories, and a novel. He does have a day job or two, and he re-publishes some of his writings for those here.
For more information, see the complete profile.
Stella died today. I am heartbroken. She’s been my constant companion for more than a year—ever since she chose me.
All I can say is she must have really loved me to help me learn a lesson this hard.
I buried her in the field near Heinrich’s grave. I will miss her for a long, long time.
Today saw the passing of science fiction great Authur C. Clarke—one of my writing heroes and the last of the early masters to leave us. Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury have all gone before into that unknown country.
Clarke’s book Childhood’s End helped me break free from traditional religious thought at a time when I could no longer deal with its repressiveness. His later book, Rendezvous with Rama helped me come to terms with the fact that I still believe in something, which I guess is why I feel at home with Unitarianism.
I won’t take up any more of your time mourning the master. But fellow LibraryThingian Tim Jones has written a better eulogy than I could.
Everybody’s restless and they’ve got no place to goSomeone’s always trying to tell themSomething they already know—Warren Zevon
As part of last week’s Friday Feast, I said that I seldom remember my dreams. That was enough to get my id upset. So two nights in a row, I have awakened in the middle of the night—OK, an hour or so before the alarm—after a bad dream. I can’t really call them nightmares because they left me more uncomfortable than frightened.
Luckily, I had an automatic rifle handy. I squeezed of a shot and missed. Then I missed again. I held down the trigger for a short burst. The creature went down, rolling over backward. Then it got back up. It ran past me. I emptied the cartridge. Again and again, it got back up each time I hit it.
Finally, I woke up. I was not scared so much as frustrated, and I had a very full bladder. I went back to sleep fairly quickly after crawling back in and pulling up the covers.
Now I don’t want to go into a deep analysis of these dreams. It is fairly obvious that I am worried about something, probably nothing that a stable job wouldn’t provide the right ammunition for.
31 October. Another interpretation of the second dream, if not this sequence, is that I have been feeling my own mortality recently. Death stalks us all. We may knock it back a bit, but it always gets up. Just like in those stupid horror movies.
Is this a ghost? Matt says the figure appeared after the negatives were developed.
Photo by:Matt from Springfield, Illinois
Now troubles are many,they’re as deep as a well.I can swear there ain’t no heavenbut I pray there ain’t no hell.—Laura Nero
I came across an interesting article (Roach, 2006) this week. It lists several failed attempts to scientifically prove that something of ourselves survives death.
Most of these attempts were funny. One was tragic. That “researcher” set up a means to verify that any postmortem communication was from him. Then he locked up his apartment and turned on the gas, literally giving his life for science.
The question that the article fails to address is this: Why do we feel the need to “scientifically” prove an afterlife? We are a long, long way from having the instrumentation required to measure the presence of the soul, and it is impossible to measure its absence.
The afterlife falls into the realm of religion and belief. That is a completely different system of understanding the universe than science, and the two realms do not seem to overlap. True—brain researchers have now identified a structure in the brain that is responsible for religious experience. But they are unable to say whether that structure evolved (or was designed) to experience real spiritual phenomena or as a mechanism for social control that encourages us to work together for our common survival, occasionally at the cost of our own individual survival.
I do not believe that science and religion are incompatible, merely two different approaches that may yield inconsistent results. I know several Christian scientists (note the small s; I don’t personally know anyone who claims a capital S.) who have fairly strong religious beliefs. All of them manage to compartmentalize the two belief systems.
So I guess the point of this ramble is: Believe what you choose, but don’t think your religious beliefs are fact—we neither prove nor disprove them. And don’t try to force them down anyone else’s throat.
When it comes to the afterlife, my father’s saying applies. “We’ll see.” Or maybe we won’t. If not, it won’t matter to us then.
Today we say farewell to OldFriend’s littlest sister, who was found dead in her bed by one of her children. She was several years younger than me, but she had lead a very hard life—mostly as a result of a series of bad decisions—bad decisions anyone could have made, and some did make but then reversed.
So, I took a day off from work to travel to the funeral, but I spread it over two days—half today and half tomorrow. Suna took me shopping for the right clothes to wear to the funeral. We picked out a tan silk jacket, a dark gray shirt (not for today. I wore a white one I bought from the Overpriced Outlets north of town), some dark brown slacks, and a tie to tie them together. We had a really nice lunch at Mother Fudd’s. Now I’m off into the wilds.
The trip down was interesting. I took SH71 south, but it took forever to get to it. There was an accident or something, and US183 was stop-and-go most of the way across town. Then when I got to Houston, the Troll Road was a parking lot. Imagine paying good money to sit on a Troll Road. But I made it with about 10 minutes to spare—and conveniently less time to interact with X2B. This was supposed to be about OldFriend’s family, not my current situation.
The funeral was very Catholic, even though many of the siblings no longer are. I paid my respects to all the siblings and to OldFriend’s parents. They said that they appreciated me making the trip to show support for them.
Afterward, I visited shortly with RemainingBrother and drove home.
All-in-all, it was a long day—tiring and draining but, at the same time, rewarding.
