"Just make sure you say goodbye," said Bobby.  This surprised me. 

I joke about my death.  Maybe that is the expression of my own fear of dying, lately increasing as the frequency of various little ailments, infections, fevers, and spells of exhaustion increase.  As my death anxiety increases, so does my compulsive obsession with finding—and capturing on camera, if I can—each evaporating moment of clear and delicate beauty.  That's an irony for one like me who has squandered so much to be now reaching, often and with earnestness, to touch the evanescent intangibles all about the place.  I do that now fully half the time, and only when I am feeling brave enough to not make jokes about death. 

But the jokes hurt Bobby, and he let me know in no uncertain terms that he does not appreciate me hurting him this way.  He told me to stop talking about death as if it didn't matter, as if it were a joke.  He cried. 

He doesn't want to lose me, and maybe if he runs into a trigger-happy cop some day, he won't have to; he'll go first.  But Bobby is nine years younger than me, and barring a grotesquely premature death for him, he will be left to observe mine. 

Just make sure you say goodbye. 

Holy fuck!  That boy's touch is priceless.  The best touch is seldom where you want it, and never comes anytime close to when you planned it.  And that touch hurts a little bit—if it's really right.  I used to prefer a physical location, when I could arrange it, and I last stole from him a touch like that over fifteen years ago.  We have very slowly, over long separations since then, become friends.  Now when Bobby touches me, it is always up somewhere around my heart, and he does it always when I least expect it.  Like last night, we were just starting to watch a movie, and in the flickering light of a paused DVD, he stops me cold by telling me that it hurts him a lot when I make jokes about my death.  Boy. 

Katherine Hepburn is dead.  Death is hard, but it is all the more difficult to take when the person who is gone lived as much as Katherine did, and for so very long.  I worried eternally that we'd lose her, for so long in fact that the threat became moot.  I knew that it would be terrible, but I began to know that it would never happen. 

I have never been able to put my finger on what I have felt at every experience of death, and felt most clearly of all when my father died.  I feel it now.  It is a kind of gratitude, a sorrow-filled comfort in knowing that the feeling of loss is real, that the seeming limitlessness of grief gives to us an echo of a parallel and truly limitless reality.  When my father died without warning from a silent MI, I experienced something eternal.  He would not reappear some days hence inexplicably alive, and thus cast as unnecessary and absurd the agony of his loss.  My father was here one day, the same gentle, loving man I had always taken for granted, who had always been here the next day, only on that one 'next day' he was gone forever.  Amid the inundations of grief and sadness and the howling pain, I faintly understood that even if all other experiences in life were phony, untrustworthy, misleading and manipulating, this experience of death and absolute loss had provided for me a fleeting though painful contact with absolute reality. 

And as with my father, I also never expected Katherine Hepburn to ever be dead.  I'm beginning to get it now; that one day I will go there too, and that is not OK yet, but it will be.  We mangle the concept of living with our minds, but life is anchored by death, and experiencing the absoluteness of death helps us incorporate something infinite into our perspective on living. 

It's time. 

It is always time, but I am nowhere near as consistent as John, nor as prolific in posting as exliontamer.  They post daily, staying focused on producing a tangible result, a readable and interesting web page.  I approach my computer with a fiendish glee, for I know it will take me away from reality for days, letting me get lost in tweaking the fucked-up contraption that is Windows®, or in tweaking the plethora of programs which infest it.  I regularly kill my two days off by sitting here, producing nothing.  I am thinking of splitting the two days off, so I don't get so deep into coma before needing to then return to work, which is the case now.  The laundry I kept planning on doing since Sunday is finally in the washer.  The computer is worse off for all the deleting and moving of files, the uninstalling and reinstalling of programs which has occupied me since Sunday.  And here I am finally trying to dash off a few words in the last few minutes before work, after two days off spent on nothing. 

And so, it is always time.  But my method of lunging to the task at the last possible moment gives everything I do an artificial urgency, and a faux significance.  This is why I used to enjoy being a firefighter; on precious occasion in those days events would conspire to feed my craving for escape, and that particular flight from reality was reinforced by the willing support of my community.  There's a fire!  ...and I would have to drop everything, fly into action, executing with speed and skill all the tasks of my extensive training, and using all the gadgets which I loved just for themselves--getting to use them was a bonus. 

Now, the A/C blasts and the blinds are shut, I make it cold and dark.  Illuminated only by this monitor's light, I play with gadgets that I would love if they had a use, even an occasional one.  I could give them a use.  That's what this page is, I guess.  But what's the service in that?  Besides, this is incomplete and I am out of time.  No time for the telling of the recent seizure at the job interview.  No time for the recounting of sublimely Spring-like days, blossoms abounding.  No time to talk about my fascination with everything, increasing as I age, from the clues of human history carried in mitochondrial DNA to the astonishing advancement of the Lesser Spirits throughout current human events.  It is time, and there is no more time.  Maybe I'll pick up some of the germs of ideas which I must now leave unexplored. 

Maybe.  Everything seems heavy. 

And I thought my writhing discontent in the face of crimes by my government was simply a symptom of my own private paranoia.  There is near-universal acquiescence among my American brethren to the excesses of the state, as if such obscenities were not being perpetrated at all.  Their lockstep is persuasive to one like me, eager to pretend nothing is wrong.  And it is easy to do at first.  As legislation has been passed to limit or eliminate personal freedoms and privacy, life has gone on apparently unchanged.  The weather disappoints, love eludes, bills mount, and jobs demand.  Everything continues just as before, without any obvious or profound change. 

This is encouraging to a child whose mother has just married an ogre; the child thinks, "Maybe things won't be so bad after all."  The child warms to the monster, since to resist is futile.  Hence the child embraces his own imperilment, pretending he isn't really imperiled, because an abused child has no choice but to depend on his mother and her ill-chosen mate for everything.  Accept the unacceptable, or die.  He has no real power apart from simply changing his perception.  "Maybe it is not so bad to have an ogre for a daddy," posits the child.  Then the ogre does what ogres do, and eats the child. 

The bad news of the reality in which we currently live is that we are not children.  We do not bear the impenetrable cloak of childhood incapacity to shield us from our responsibility to do something about the monster among us.  When we are eaten by the monster of American imperialism and elitism, which we have created, we will share guilt for that because, unlike the child, we have the power to stop it.  It is human nature to first try and accommodate the unreasonable and illegal demands of government before finally rejecting those demands and instituting new government.  It is good that governments are not easily disposable.  But our peril lies in our failure to dismantle this monstrosity before it overpowers us. 

The Old Man of the Mountain is dead.  His visage gazed out from the side of Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire for ten thousand years.  I find epic irony in the fact that he chose the year of the inaptly-named Patriot Act II to cast himself down from that precipice, in the state whose motto is Live Free or Die.  He has clearly made his choice.  Whether we intend to or not we are making the same choice.  Personally, if it were up to me, I would have us choose to live free and NOT die.  We do not need these scary narrow-minded negativists, like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft.  We do not need to tolerate the abuse of shriveled souls such as George W. Bush.  That we tolerate them at all speaks only of our lassitude and moral indifference. 

We will get what we deserve.  If we fail to confront this contemptuous monster that is consuming the United States, the tragedy will not be the suffering which we and our children will endure.  The tragedy will be that a once great nation devoted to goodness and justice will have perished, and that the once welcoming, generous and gentle home of Lady Liberty will have become her cruel and loveless prison.