Moaning Myrtle

It's been a rough couple of months as far as death is concerned...the world has lost a quite a few heavily, visually influential people. Today for some reason, I've really been thinking about it a lot.

"I was just sitting in the U-bend, thinking about death..."
-Moaning Myrtle

I was at a restaurant for my friend Maggie's birthday last night and for some reason, "The Dark Knight" was on the TV. I say, "for some reason," because it seems an odd choice for over-dinner viewing. I stole many glances at the TV during dinner to admire what a find job Heath Ledger did portraying The Joker. It got me to thinking that there were so many blank pages in his book yet to be filled that are now destined to remain blank.

I think about Bernie Mac and that he'll never again be a part of Danny Ocean's team.

I think of Richard Harris and how much more I preferred him as Professor Dumbledore rather than Michael Gambon.

Being a guitar player and an appreciator of those who play it well, I sometimes wonder about Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan and what they would have become had it not been for their youthful deaths.

In the last couple of months, we've lost Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, Steve McNair, and just recently, Walter Cronkite. All of these people had very visible impacts on America/The World.

People die everyday and have been doing so since the advent of man, but we never really get used to it, do we? Even those of us who are confident of an afterlife struggle with death. It's so hard when we miss a person, or we can see what a strong impact their life made on others. We want to mourn them, but we are torn between mourning and continuing to make the most of our short time here on Earth.

"Follow me and let the dead bury their own dead."
-Jesus Christ

How precious is life? Considering the human reproductive process, the probability of any one of us being born is MILLIONS to one. Somehow, when we were born, we won the race to the egg. Let alone the probability of a single planet in a vast galaxy that has the capacity to sustain life. And yet humanity can be so cavalier in creating new life. So many unadopted children, so many single parents, so many irresponsible parents, so many abandoned children left to ponder their existence on their own.

How fragile is life? One squeezed-trigger/One bullet, one careless second behind the wheel, one blood clot, one moment of giving-up, In the same cavalier manner that humanity now creates life, it also destroys it. Gangs kill people to sustain their own egos according to their meaningless/arbitrary systems of pride, people knowingly drive drunk, people abuse drugs and miss out on precious seconds/minutes/hours/days/weeks/years that we don't get back.

How precious is our time? Can we really afford to waste precious minutes dwelling on unchangeable details, festering in drug-induced stupors, taking for granted the extreme improbability of our mere existence, harboring anger, holding grudges. Isn't life difficult enough w/out these complications?

Friends - Today, if we enjoy a beverage in company, let us offer a toast to life, and mean it.