Moi

I am really tired of writing obits for friends. If you are a friend of mine, please do not kick the bucket. I am really tired of this. Get a life.

If I had one story to tell it would be about the redemption of human suffering. It would be about the resilience of life. The inspiring ability that humans have to try and try again, in spite of great obstacles. This seems to be the way we are put together.
We learn to walk by falling over and over until we get the vertical 2-footed thing right.
We break each other's hearts until broken beyond repair, we finally learn to love. We die and bury our dead and hurry home to procreate.
We have no indications of life after death, save fables and stories, yet we, most of us, believe we are more than biological components of recyclable earth compost.
Most of us do not think our enduring legacy will be a food for worms, yet we have no logical reason to believe this.

Filled with our own self-importance, we strive day and night for goals we rarely fulfill.
We die with our lives incomplete, a smile on our lips, knowing we tried.
Life? I failed that test, but hey, it's over.
It's behind me, like high school chemistry class, so party on.
School's out and I am ready for my heavenly reward.
A seat at the big banquet table in the sky.
I pillaged, plundered, lied, cheated and repented, a bit.
Move over Saint Peter, the seat next to the apostle is reserved for me.
Gonna be a crowded table with all of us clamoring for one spot. A spot we all assume is our rightful due for a life well spent.

The human spirit is incorrigible. Confident beyond reason. We see a mountain and yearn to summit its peak. See a cliff and dive off like a bird in flight. See an ocean and develop a craft to search its briny depths.
And do we perish?
Of course.
In vast numbers.
In tragic ways.
Yet off we go again, challenging earth and sea and sky.
In a kind of Icarus splendor, too close to the sun does not bother human kind. We are phoenix; we are going to spring up from the ashes renewed, better informed, if not more cautious. Some of us stay home, waiting to die in the arms of our beloved, and building our nests from bridal bower to crone's deathbed with infinite care. Window dressing and flooring materials and gigantic ovens that can cook an entire buffalo for the tribe or feed a flock of seagulls for a week. We fill our homes with more stuff than any animal would ever abide. A penguin carrying its egg on its feet is happy to have a spot on the ice to stand on, a place in the middle of the circle of penguins to shield him from the artic storms.

The human must have a down comforter, color-coordinated with bath towels and carpets, delivered by a fuel combustion truck to a street lined by one house after the other, none of which protect the other from anything but the neighbors' greed.
We are greedy and ridiculous and we don't care.
We are happy to be humans, to walk our earth and taste its fruits and be fruitful and multiply as we were bidden.
We are an incorrigible lot.
We war against those who differ too much from our own system with those who are too close. We fight with our parents and our children. And our breadwinners. We flee from our ancestral villages and then search for our roots.
We study history written by the victors, for clues on how to win at this game of life.
We chose, we gamble, we come up short.
We idealize those whose luck brings them riches and die poor and penniless, a pocket full of lottery tickets in our pockets. Alone, bewildered and always a contented peaceful countenance displays a comfort at a job well done.
A strange bunch, humans. The write and read and leave volumes behind for others to pour over. Memoirs of their travels and travails.
School children who could be out running barefoot in sunny fields grazing like their fellow mammals, find themselves shod and seated studying dusty texts from voices long silenced by times' ticking clock. These same children rebel though they might grow up to read and write and teach their children to do the same.
How can a race with such obstructed hunting and gathering instincts survive? And yet we do.
Carnivores who have never seen fresh blood, dine on steak by candlelight.
We are the only species not to have evolved our bodies for different climates. No fur in artic climes or thicker skin. We use our opposable thumb to build shelters to heat or cool such that a person from a tropical locale is almost identical biologically from his northern brethren. Not like the dogs whose varies species have adapted for their climate environment not to mention workload.
Homo sapiens lumber through time, surprising evolution by adapting without change.
Coming back for more, surviving great obstacles, many self imposed, against great odds, we survive and stumble forward into a future no one can imagine though many have tried.
Incorrigible and unstoppable, blindly optimistic and foolhardy.
How does such a creature like this endure?
By its illogical nature, it is able to beat the odds.

Helium.com is an interesting site.
I have posted numerous articles and essays there, on topics such as natural medicine, ennui, and travel.
Especially ennui.