My Sick Mind

In recent years, I have deeply soured on the idea of God and heaven.      I wasn’t always the most devout follower to begin with, having been forced to attend Summer Bible School when I should have been enjoying a summer away from regular school.  At least that’s how I figured it.  What am I doing in a church basement making popsicle-stick coasters while listening to Bible verses, when I could be listening to my Beatles albums or swimming in the lake.      After all, He took my father from me, and left me stranded in this space, so what did I owe Him?      It wasn’t some self-inflicted death, either. It was heart disease that took my dad at the age of 47, so the manufacturer produced a flawed product.  And He didn’t make doctors smart enough to fix it. I was made to look after myself in my formative years, with no siblings or male influence to build on.  It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to a kid, but it cer...

I would like to own a gun, but I would have to keep the bullets somewhere else.  I wouldn’t want the temptation of finishing my life at the whim of a bad set of circumstances. I don’t trust myself with myself. It does concern me, though - death. Mostly how and when, now that the “with someone or alone” debate has been decided. Wondering if it’s going to be a lingering disease, or something more quick and to the point?  If I linger like my mother did, I’ll be a burden to myself and others, and the final five or six years won’t be “living” in its truest sense. Perhaps what bothers me the most about it all is that my current active lifestyle will come to a crashing halt at some point sooner than later.  I’m 68 now, and pushing myself to the point where I ask myself “why are you doing this to yourself?”  To go from that to nothing will be a mental strain that I don’t know if I could handle. Which is another reason why I should not own a gun. As an only c...

To paraphrase the great John Riggins: “I’m bored, I’m broke, and I’m back.” Maybe not broke, but certainly bored. I was reminded that this forum existed recently, and maybe I can fill the empty hours here, as I did almost twenty years ago. Twitter ( X ) is short shrift for ranting. My Facebook account was hacked and stolen. I guess someone really wanted my cat photos. Instagram isn’t the proper forum for ranting. They just want pretty photos and little comments. That’s not me. I don’t know if this is me or not, but it’s more me than any of that other stuff. So, here we are. It’s likely that these posts could be morbid in nature, since I have been assessing my life (and death) over the past few years. Embracing my mortality will be useful, and I encourage it. Mom died several years ago. As the only child, I was the primary caregiver. That responsibility has been removed from me, and as great a burden as that was to lift, it left me with nobody to directly care for. By this time in l...

There was a post on Twitter … ahem … X today from the Phillies. It showed some kids holding up their cell phones at Bryce Harper, with the caption “Remember.” Which, of course, got me to thinking. If we’re running around with our cell phones out, recording every possible encounter, are we remembering it later or just being reminded of it?  There is a huge difference. When I was a kid - in the 1960s - we didn’t take a lot of family photos, and the only time dad’s movie camera came out was at Christmas, where he could blind me with the giant spotlights in my face. The point is, I remember that stuff. All that stuff from my childhood. I remember it. I didn’t put it on YouTube or attach it to an Instagram story.  It happened to me, and it’s in my memory. That’s part of what remember means. “Hey, you remember that time we did that thing?” “Yeah - I got it all on video.” But mostly they say “filming” which is odd, since we haven’t used film in decades, and most of the kids saying “...

 I would have thought that going through the death of my mother would be just “another experience,” but as usual, my assumptions were incorrect. She died almost a year ago - August - and the effects of watching her demise and ultimately watching her die have made irreparable impressions on me. I was a child of nine years when my father died. He died at home, in our living room, and I watched it. The slow, impenetrable loss of life made an impression, but it wasn’t until many years later that it would make itself known. As a kid, I had no understanding of death - what it was, how it happened, or what happens afterward. I remember feeling almost nothing, and later feeling like something had changed, but I wasn’t certain what. Eventually, it dawned on me that I no longer had a father, or a father-figure. Mom tried to replace that with friends and family, but I was already too shut-off from people that I couldn’t accept their gestures. I don’t know if they were awkward or if it was my ...

If you’re old - like me , you remember buying stereo equipment. And, like me, you remember spending a lot of money on what looked like great stereo equipment, only to find that it was ... well ... mediocre stereo equipment. In the 1970s, we knew what the “Good Stuff” was. McIntosh, Marantz, high-end Sony - the stuff that we saw in Stereo Review magazine. Those full-page ads with mouth-drooling stuff that we couldn’t afford if we took-out a small business loan. All I can remember is seeing that stuff, and knowing that I couldn’t afford it, and going to a low-end stereo store (like at the Mall) and buying a rack of stuff by Panasonic that came in twelve boxes, with speakers that could have substituted as furniture. If I paid $400 (1976 dollars) for a giant rack system, I felt like a winner. That was substantially better than spending $1,000 for a McIntosh amp, where I’d still have to spend another $1,500 for qualified speakers and a Dual or Audio-Technica turntable. Somehow, that Panaso...