ornoth

It’s been a couple weeks since the Puggle left home, and I’m pretty well adjusted. I think the main source of my anxiety was the thought of him suffering, and not knowing what I could do for him. But now he’s beyond all that. The high drama of his impending death is over, and it’s just a question of adjusting to his absence as a known, unchangeable fact.

However, before my memory of the Puggle fades, I want to take a moment and record some of the wonderful memories he gave me. Some of these are one-time events, and some are just the gifts he gave me every day. I know these probably won’t mean much to you, but I wanted to save them here for future reference, to serve as a remembrance of his character and the companionship he provided.

So here’s the list.

Puggie Nose Leather (“Puggie knows leather”)
His habit of curling up under the covers and going to sleep behind my knee, with his head on my calf
His habit of pawing at the blanket to let me know he wanted to get under the covers
His amusing habit of flossing every day using the cord on the blinds
How he’d often jump onto my lap while I was sitting at the computer, then putting his front paws on my shoulder, asking to be picked up and given a Huggle
How he’d curl up in the crook of my arm while I was sitting up in bed reading
The evening ritual of him standing on my chest to get his kitty massage after I climbed into bed
How he’d invariably sabotage any attempt to make the bed
Our occasional walks in the lobby: his ”constitutionals“
How those walks would usually end with him running back to our door after someone in the building spooked him
The Puggle Skywalk between the countertop and the kitchen table in the Fenway apartment
The total destruction of the door frames in the Fenway apartment
The Kitty Crazies, which in the Fenway apartment resulted in him clutching the door frame, suspended four feet off the ground
His fuzzy Puggle toes
”Here comes Puggle Claws, here comes Puggle Claws, right down Puggle Claws Lane. He’s a Puggle ’cos he’s got Puggle claws and a little Pug brain…“
Sleeping inside a kick drum… amazing
His completely predictable hissing at any women who visited

The time he cleaned my bicycle chain for me and got grease all over his face
Climbing through all the kitchen cabinets
When I built a little pagoda that allowed him to jump all the way up into the top shelf in the bedroom closet
His annoying habit of leaving the bathroom door open after he came in and left while I was showering
”Reach out… touch face.“
”It’s not sex unless the Puggle is watching.“
Always leaving one of the kitchen barstool chairs pulled partway out so that he could jump up onto the kitchen counter
Coming home after a weekend away and having to have extended love-fests on the bed before anything else
His catching a mouse at the Fenway apartment and absolutely having no idea what to do with it
His Puggie pantaloons
Wanton shredding of cardboard boxes, and tenderizing them beforehand for him with my Benchmade pocket knife
Strength-sapping sunbeams
His habit of sleeping on the bed above (and sometimes atop) one’s head
Waking up in the morning with the Puggle in the same position as me—on his side, with his body under the covers and his head on the pillow, face-to-face with me
His climbing up into kitchen cabinet and lying down after I closed the glass doors behind him
His taking it upon himself to wash my hair for me back when I had long hair
The rising trill (known as ”mipping“) that he’d make when asking a question or jumping up on the bed

Thank you, Puggle. For these, and for everything.

Edited additions:

How he’s tell you he'd had enough play by giving you a “nibble”: gently clomping down on you with his teeth, as if to say “I could take a piece out of you if I really wanted, so simmer down, rude boy…”
And if you didn’t simmer down, he’d give you “the bunny hop”: grabbing you with his front paws and kicking with his legs and his rear claws out.

“What kinda cat is he? He's an Eviscerator!”
“Cute, cute little Puggie. I wanna make him stay up all night…”
His uncanny ability to elude veterinary staff; twice he got away from them and out of the back room, once screaming all the way down the hallway, into the waiting area, and into a corner underneath a table, requiring us to move all their furniture to get him out!

The world has lost a beautiful, beautiful soul.

I guess it’s time for the promised Puggle update. You’ll recall that I took him to the vet on Wednesday the 14th for labored breathing, and he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, with only a short time left to live.

That day, the vet drained the built-up fluid from his chest, which gave him immediate, but temporary relief. My goal was to nurse him through to January, spending some quality time with him, and put him down right after New Years.

On coming home, Pug did seem to be a lot more alert and active, and was able to breathe like a kitten again. The vet gave me a green light to give him “anything he’ll eat”, so I spoiled him with chicken, scrambled eggs, bacon, SciDi dry (no accounting for kitty tastes), Swiss cheese, Jax cheese curls, and saucers of milk. We spent a lot of time together, and I took a bunch of movie clips of my fuzzy buddy on my cell phone.

As Christmas got closer, I thought I could get away for a couple days with family. I planned to leave Friday noon and return Sunday afternoon, and my cat-sitting service would visit once on Saturday and once on Sunday.

On Wednesday, I noticed that Pug was starting to have difficulty breathing again. However, I thought I’d have enough time to bring him in to the vet’s after Xmas. But Thursday night he was so bad that I concluded that I’d bring him in and have him put to sleep Friday morning before I left Boston.

But when the time came, he seemed pretty good. He didn’t seem to have any difficulty breathing, and was pretty active, as well. So against my prior plans, I left for Maine, hoping Pug would be okay over the weekend.

Well, as you have no doubt surmised, he wasn’t. About 4pm on Christmas Eve, the petsitter called to tell me how he’d found him. He covered Pug with a sheet right where he lay.

After a perfunctory holiday observance, I headed home at 3pm today. His body lay there, just as beautiful as he’d been in life. I had to get through the tasks of moving him, putting him in a box, taking him down to the animal hospital to be cremated, and saying goodbye forever. On Christmas Day.

I don’t know how I could even begin to relate to you what that cat meant to me. Every day he was a source of joy, love, amusement, and warmth. He was a dear, dear friend, and one of the most central parts of my life. I shall be hard pressed to find another companion like him.

I guess I can take solace in the realization that his suffering is gone forever. But boy, has he left an immense, gaping hole in my heart.

May you be blessed with devotion and companionship as unwavering as that you gave to me, my dear friend. Namaste!

Puggle is dying.

I brought the little guy in to the vet because for the past few weeks he seemed to be having gradually more and more difficulty breathing. No apparent pain or even much discomfort, which is good. But despite that, the vet’s diagnosis is dire: congestive heart failure.

There aren’t many options to consider. Untreated, he will die within weeks. We could drain the fluid from his chest and put him on a diuretic, which would give him short-term relief, but which isn’t a viable long-term treatment. We could undertake a lengthy, uncomfortable, and expensive sequence of aggressive treatment, with a lot of risk and little guarantee of results. Or we could euthanize him.

What seemed to me to be the most compassionate thing to do was to give him the short-term treatment, see how he responds to it, spend some quality time together, get used to the idea, and let him go when his symptoms return. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to nurse him through to the beginning of January, so that the holidays aren’t an eternal reminder of his passing.

Puggle is my first and only pet, which makes this really hard, and he’s been my constant companion for the past fourteen years. I’ve always known that this day would come, and dreaded it, because the little infestation is a very, very important part of my life. So today has without question been one of the most painful days of my life.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I’m pretty good at resorting to cold logic to subdue my emotions. I have been telling myself that everyone dies sooner or later, and he’s just a cat, after all. But the heart doesn’t agree with that, and my heart and mind seem to be taking turns speaking from the pulpit in a very heated debate taking place inside my skull.

In a way, this is a good ending, though. The diagnosis leaves little room for me to second-guess my decisions. It’s not one of those situations where he’ll need daily shots or an extensive treatment regimen for a long duration. And the Puggle doesn’t appear to be in any pain or much discomfort. So in that sense, it makes saying goodbye a lot easier.

But at the same time, he’s not in respiratory arrest, so I do get some time to say goodbye. The vet said I can feed him “anything he’ll eat”, so I’ll be picking him up some cheese curls, ice cream, bacon, and grass for his enjoyment. And because my company takes the week between Christmas and New Years off, I’ll have that whole week to spend with him, if his health permits.

That might be bad news for you, though, because I expect I’ll be posting a lot about this over the next month. The point isn’t to solicit sympathy, but just to record the things I’m going through. And to hopefully remind you that we all—cats, dogs, and humans—have a very brief time on this earth, and we should express our affection and appreciation of one another while we can, because all too soon, it will be too late.

While listening to one of the Zencast Dharma talks on the way to work this morning, Vipassana teacher Gil Fronsdal made an interesting assertion: that the wisdom we usually associate with our elders might not be a result of a wealth of worldly experience, as most people assume. Instead, he posited that such wisdom comes from close proximity to death.

Think about it. There are comparatively young people who have had near-death experiences which have forced them to confront their own mortality. Almost invariably, they come out of those experiences transformed, with a tremendous new appreciation for the preciousness of the brief time we each have on this Earth.

Now, “proximity to death” doesn’t necessarily mean that someone has to come close to dying. The loss of one or more loved ones might cause one to reflect on how one lives one’s own life. What’s important isn’t one’s age or that one has had a near-death experience; this transformation happens when an individual openly contemplates their own death, sincerely accepts and internalizes their impermanence, and lets an omnipresent knowledge of their own mortality inform the decisions they make.

I’m always surprised when people say they find that kind of orientation morbid or depressing. It’s only morbid if you haven’t accepted the fact that you are going to die. Might be seventy years from now. Might be next week. But it also could happen before you finish reading this article. Living your life denying that it’s going to end someday just doesn’t seem the path of wisdom to me. Someone who lives like that will suddenly find themselves on their deathbed, wishing they’d done things they haven’t done, and wishing they’d said things to people that they’ve always left unsaid. In short, ignoring your mortality is a surefire way to end your life full of regrets.

At the other end of the scale, accepting your mortality doesn’t mean living in constant fear. Wisdom is about accepting that it can happen, and will happen one of these days. That knowledge gives you the impetus to find a way to do those things you really want to do and tell people the things you really want to tell them.

If you’ll forgive the horrible linguistic coincidence, it’s like the gentle pressure of having a deadline. If there are things you want to do “someday”, it’s more likely you’ll do them if you know there’s a deadline than if you can put them off eternally. And no matter how much you might wish otherwise, death will not be put off eternally.

That’s the real revelation here. Accepting the grim fact that our lives are ephemeral doesn’t make you depressive and fearful; instead, the knowledge of death liberates you. It encourages you to get the most out of each day and each relationship, and it prompts you to clean up your “stuff” with the other people in your life. That way, when you do reach your deathbed, you can be satisfied that you lived your life well and have left nothing undone or unsaid and—most importantly—with nothing to regret.

Ironically, this belief is something I’ve held for a long time. Whenever possible, I have tried to make decisions based on the criterion of which choice I would regret more, when viewed from the perspective of my deathbed. Somehow I stumbled onto that piece of wisdom years and years ago, and it has really served me extremely well. It’s very heartening to hear a Buddhist teacher sanction the same basic concept: that wisdom comes from proximity to death.

I can’t say whether it’s a philosophy that will work for you, but I offer it here for your consideration. I would be delighted if it helped you get more enjoyment and contentment out of your life. After all, as they say, you only go around once.

I always feel some degree of trepidation relating my philosophical revelations. Either they sound like trite, self-evident aphorisms, or they take so much abstract language to relate that they come across completely flat on paper.

Last night I had another interesting revelation. Like the others, it’s going to take some background.

Many Buddhist sects express some form of belief in reincarnation. Throughout his multiple lives, a man must attempt to perform meritorious acts in order to accumulate positive karma and promote one’s future wisdom.

In addition, nearly all schools of Buddhism promote a belief in the unity of all life, some dialect of the concept that we are all truly one in essence.

The point of these tenets is to help adherents overcome the problem of ego. Buddhism stresses compassion above all other values, and modeling compassion requires a certain suppression of the ego’s belief that it is more important than anyone else. It is difficult to express true loving compassion while we’re busy defending our ego’s self-conception of us as somehow special, better, and more important than everyone else.

However, I’ve always had an innate aversion to both of these concepts. I couldn’t explain why, other than indicating a stubborn belief that we are nothing more than bio-mechanical organisms that live briefly and die, and our consciousness, in whatever high esteem we hold it, dies with the meat that houses it. And although we have self-evident dependencies, we are not “one”.

Okay, that’s the background. Now let’s set the scene for the revelation.

I am presently reading “The History of Surrealism”, a horribly dry but authoritative account of the movement, originally written in French by Maurice Nadeau back in 1940. Here is a particular passage where Nadeau speaks about the movement’s primary leader, André Breton.

Life and the dream, he had shown, were two communicating vessels, in which events were homologous, it being impossible for the individual to assert that the latter was more real than the former. This time he went further: he abolished any frontier between the objective and the subjective. There exists, according to Breton, between man and the world, a perpetual and continuous correspondence. There exists, above all, a continuity of events which can be antecedently perceived and whose correspondences remain invisible. Yet self-analysis permits their observation.

Upon reading this, a couple things struck me.

First, the last two lines are a fairly concise statement of a Buddhist approach to life: there is something to life that is beyond its appearance to our mundane senses, and contemplative meditation allows us to access that. Now, the surrealists had a general familiarity with Buddhism, so this isn’t necessarily an independent observation, but it did put me in the mindset of interpreting this passage from a Buddhist perspective. Which led to the following.

It seems to me that Breton, as depicted in this passage, is a bit strident in his insistence upon some existence beyond objective reality. I felt this was an expression of a powerful fear of death, of the very impermanence that Buddhism teaches us to accept.

Or does it?

Breton’s unchecked ego brought him to this conceptual argument in order to bolster the idea that he would somehow live beyond his meat. But in reincarnation and the mystical oneness of all life, Buddhism also seems to provide psychological crutches that allow the overpowering ego to avoid facing death!

In a word, Buddhism’s concepts of karma, reincarnation, and the oneness of all life, while helpful in allowing the individual to suppress ego in order to cultivate a healthy sense of compassion, can also be viewed as the sheerest vanity, providing the ego with ample ways of rationalizing away the blunt, absolutely immutable fact of our impermanence and death.

I find this particularly ironic, because Buddhism is all about mastering one’s ego and accepting the fact that we die. To realize that such an obvious, ego-driven aversion to death can be found within Buddhism’s core tenets was a real revelation.

One of the things Americans rarely think about is history. Very few of us have any sense of what has gone on in our town, our neighborhood, perhaps even our building. In that sense, we Bostonians have a bit of an advantage, since Boston is a very small area with a long and rich historical heritage (for America, at least). Walk the streets of Boston and on virtually every block you’ll come across a building that has some noteworthy story associated with it.

I happened to buy a unit in one of Boston’s most noteworthy buildings. The initial Hotel Vendome was designed and built by William G. Preston in 1871 in Boston’s newly-filled Back Bay neighborhood, then greatly expanded in 1881. It is the finest example of the French Second Empire style in Boston, and located on the broad Parisien boulevard of Commonwealth Avenue. In 1882, it was the first public building in Boston to be furnished with electric lights. It was the site of many prominent social functions, and the guest register included stays by Ulysses S. Grant, President Grover Cleveland, P.T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and John Singer Sargent. In 1903 the visiting team— the Pittsburgh Pirates, led by Honus Wagner—stayed at the Vendome during the first World Series ever held. In a bit of synchornicity, both my mother’s and her sister’s graduating classes from nursing school held parties in the Vendome during World War II.

But that’s all nothing compared to the fire: the worst firefighting tragedy in Boston history, one of the twelve worst in all of U.S. history, getting an entire chapter in Stephanie Schorow’s “Boston on Fire: A History of Fires and Firefighting in Boston” which I recently read.

It happened on Saturday June 17, 1972—the day before Father’s Day—while the Vendome was undergoing a major renovation. The fire broke out in the upper stories, and eventually sixteen engine companies, five ladder companies, two aerial towers, and a rescue company fought the blaze. The fire was under control, and fresh firefighters were conducting mop-up operations when an overloaded beam under the second floor gave way and the entire southeast corner of the five-story building came down, killing nine firefighters, injuring eight more, and destroying a ladder truck. Two of the twenty-five orphaned offspring would go on to become firefighters.

Twenty-five years later, a memorial to the firefighters who lost their lives was dedicated on the Commonwealth Avenue mall. A long, low arc of black granite describes the events and gives the names of the men who were lost. A fireman’s helmet and coat are casually draped over the stone, but forged in bronze. Every year a brief ceremony of observance is held.

As a resident of such a building, it’s hard to forget its history. I live on that same southeast corner, surely within inches of the 40 by 45-foot section that collapsed. I live on the second floor, surely within inches of the resulting pile of debris, which was noted both as 26 feet and two stories deep. I live within inches of the place where eight men died.

Knowing that you are living in the middle of the site of such an infamous tragedy would probably be enough to freak a lot of people out. It doesn’t bother me, really. After all, I’m proud to live in a building with such historical significance. But there’s another reason why it doesn’t bug me: it’s because even though I wasn’t here way back in ’72, I still remember and honor those men, and I view my presence here not merely as just some place to live. I consider myself something of a steward of this very important landmark, and want to do my part to see that it is kept for future generations, and not forgotten in our uniquely American ignorance of who and what have come before us.

For more information and photographs about the Vendome fire and memorial, go here or here, or read “Boston on Fire”.

On Sunday, Babatunde Olatunji died. I can’t even begin to tell you the influence he had. Without Olatunji, there would be no African drumming in the United States. There would be no djembes, no jun-juns, no hand drumming circles at all. He brought West African music to the United States, and taught generations of Americans the compelling songs and rhythms of his native land. He co-founded Mickey Hart’s Planet Drum. He is the originator. The whole world has lost one of its most sparkling jewels.

Fanga alafayia, ashé ashé
Fanga alafayia, ashé ashé
Fanga alafayia, ashé ashé
Fanga alafayia, ashé ashé
Ashé-ashé, ashé-ashé
Fanga alafayia, ashé ashé

Were you raised in a particular religious faith?: No.
Do you still practice that faith? Why or why not?: No.
What do you think happens after death?: From my February 24th LJ entry "Philosophy for Dummies":
When we die, like any animal, we die. There is no essense or spirit which survives when our brain activity ceases. Because death is an inevitable end of our being, and because we never live to experience it, it is illogical to fear death. On the other hand, it certainly is logical to fear suffering and pain, if those are part of your road to death. But death itself should be accepted as the ultimate, immutable fact of life. Accept it and move on and enjoy your life, motivated further by the knowledge that your portion of life is finite.
I firmly agree with the Existential creed that there is no meaning to life other than to experience it, and believe that is an incredibly empowering, liberating, and optimistic realization.
What is your favorite religious ritual (participating in or just observing)?: Although I do not believe in religion as such, I feel that it is eminently logical to observe the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days, although not in any self-impressed wiccan sense. On those days I try to reconnect with nature and quietly celebrate the beauty and wonder of nature and life.

One tidbit: did you know that the change of seasons actually used to be observed on the cross-quarter days, rather than the solstices and equinoxes (they were thought of as the midpoints of seasons)? I find that a much more logical arrangement.

And happy Samhain everyone (even if few people realize that the cross-quarter day actually falls on November 7th).
Do you believe people are basically good?: I believe people have a strong trend toward laziness, ignorance, selfishness, and fear . As a moral relativist and secular humanist, I do not believe in the ideas of objective "good" and "evil" as such. The only "good" is acting in conformance with your own unique set of morals and values.

Bonus points if you get that reference!

I have to say this for Pope John Paul II: the little bugger's a better visual comedian than Jim Carrey! Last year I came across a photo of him posing with a gaggle of schoolchildren. Completely inappropriate for the situation, the old guy was making a face like he'd just been poked in the eye while eating a communion host that had gone bad. The photo was so funny that I had to feature it in a series of collages I was doing for art school, even though it completely violated the series' theme...

At the time, I thought it was a one-time fluke, but recently I was proved wrong. Our Man JP's recent trip to the Americas provided a couple particularly wonderful images of ecclesiastical humor. In one image (here), JP is being escorted from the PopeJet by a young priest, but his body language and expression say "Let go of me ya damned cardinal! I'm outta here I tellya!" That was followed up by another photo (here), where an attractive adolescent girl in colorful garb is presenting herself to the pontiff. His beanie is knocked askew, and he's holding his head as if to say "Oy, and I took a vow of celibacy?"

But the point of this post isn't to make fun of the chosen representative of God on Earth. No, really! After all, anyone who can type "http://images.google.com" can do that!

But this was the topic of conversation between my friend Rhonda and I when we went down a particularly interesting line of inquiry. We got onto the subject of her "version" of Heaven differing from the standard interpretation, and she described to me a recent Robin Williams movie entitled "What Dreams May Come".

Now, before I get into it, let me tell you that the movie is bad. I'm about to describe its only redeeming feature, so there's no need for you to go out and see it. Fair warning.

Rhonda brought it up because the movie's basic premise is that the afterlife we'll experience is a reflection of our expectations of it. If you believe that the afterlife is what el papa says, then that's what you'll experience; if you believe the afterlife is going to be one big orgy, then for you it will be; if you think you'll be punished for your transgressions in this life, you surely will be; and if you don't believe in life after death... Well, the movie doesn't really address that question, but I'm sure you can imagine. The basic plot of the movie is that Robin Williams dies and finds himself in the world he and his wife had always dreamed about; his wife, a needy, self-absorbed neurotic, commits suicide shortly after, and resigns herself to an eternity in her own personal hell. The basic conflict is Robin Williams' quest to be reunited with his wife and show her there's another way.

The idea that everyone could be a god ruling a world created by their own imaginings was the basis of the first story I ever got paid for, "In Our Infinite Wisdom", published more than 20 years ago. The premise was a late-night wargaming session, where the players began theorizing that if there were an infinite number of worlds, there'd be a world just like Earth, only we'd all live in castles, that one could get to simply by thinking about it. Shazam! There it is. The characters wind up continuing this line of thought, essentially incrementally thinking their way into their own individually-tailored Heaven. To give away the ending, the twist comes as they all gradually realize that there'd also be an equivalent Hell that one would be transported to simply by thinking of it, and their brief but vain struggle to not think about it.

So all this talk got me thinking about my own idea of Heaven, and how it might look. Not what I believe is after death, because I think I made than abundantly clear in my 2/24/2002 LJ article "Philosophy for Dummies" (here), when I wrote "When we die, like any animal, we die. There is no essense or spirit which survives when our brain activity ceases", but what I would like: what world I'd design if I were given free reign to create a Heaven of my own devising.

Interestingly, despite having written a story that dealt with the topic, I really have never thought about what my Heaven would be like. I decided that'd be an interesting line of inquiry. At the same time, I'm also curious about the kinds of worlds other people would create. Would they just give the universal answers of "flying angels, no disease, no hunger, no conflict", and so forth? I think you could learn a lot about someone by the unique things they'd do to create their own world and how it'd be different from everyone else's. In "What Dreams May Come", Williams' world is full of saturated colors and things made from wet paint, since his hobby is painting. I think it'd be an interesting question to ask people over beers. I also think it'd make a cool assignment -- create a ten-minute videograph of your idea of the perfect afterlife -- although in some of our cases getting willing and appropriately-endowed actors and actresses might be a bit of an issue...

So let's consider this question. Let's get the base assumptions out of the way: we're all going to prohibit things like disease, pain, conflict, hatred, inequality, injustice, and fear, right? Let's not restate the painfully obvious here. But in what less straightforward ways would your world differ from Earth? Here are some of mine...

I would have the time to do everything I want to do
"Do what thou wilt, and it hurt none" would not just be the whole of the law, but would also actually be practical and meet everyone's needs
Travelling from place to place would be both free and instantaneous, allowing you to go anywhere anytime you wanted
There would be the ability to travel to different destinations in time; you could easily visit the 1970s or the 14th century or ancient Rome if you so desired
Seasons would be more discrete; summer would be more summerlike, autumn more autumnal, and you'd know when you passed from one to the next
Similarly, urban areas would be more urban, and rural areas more rural; the two would mix less
There would be no economy, in the sense of no currency and no need to work just to maintain one's standard of living
Creating things would be quicker and less error-prone; things like baking, programming, and art would be much less labor-intensive
Things would be less pre-fabricated, and everything would be more "designed"; all housing, in particular, would demonstrate more architectural and artistic appeal
There would be very, very few smells; most odors we know wouldn't exist, and there'd be a cap on the strength of all odors
There would be no children, noisy, smelly, hateful little things that they are
Everyone would appear to be the age at which I knew them, e.g. my high school friends would be circa 1982, my college friends circa 1986, my co-workers circa 1998, and so forth
No one would have any body hair, save normal hair on the top of their head
One would have the ability to experience life as a member of the opposite gender if desired
People would be free to express their affection to one another, without fear of any kind
Sex of widely diverse flavors would be much more common; inhibiting factors such as social acceptance, rape, STDs, performance issues, and unwanted pregnancies would be alleviated
People would be able to intuit and accept (and, of course, act on) one another's turn-ons
True non-consentuality would not exist

I don't think there's any real need for me to comment any further on these. The point isn't to justify them to you, but just to noodle around some vision of what life might be like in my perfect world. And I'd hardly advertise this as an immutable list, just some brainstorming.

Now, unlike my previous postings, I'm going to open this one up for public response. However, I want to emphasize that I'm not interested in your comments about my Heaven, or the thinking that got me to this point. What I'm interested in is your description of the Heaven that you would create. I'd appreciate it if you limited your comments to that topic.

It's one part imagination, and one part character; so show me what you got!

One of the themes that I've heard a lot lately has to do with "controlling your story". I've been exposed to this mostly through Inna, since it's one of her beliefs, and has been reinforced for her during her participation in the Landmark Forum, and in the book "Conversations with God" which she gave me three months ago.

The basic premise is that you control what other people think of you, partially through your actions, but also to a large degree in what you tell them about yourself. What you tell people often defines who you are to them. Often, however, we become invested in "stories" that are outdated, unquestioned, and/or don't serve us well. Conversely, if you change what you tell people about yourself, you may well change people's impression of you. And sometimes you can even consciously change your own self-image by telling yourself something different. In this journal entry, I question one such story of mine.

In many ways what I tell people, especially at work and in social situations, boils down to this: I'm older than you think I am. This came about because of the importance I put on living a youthful and energetic lifestyle; in order to confirm to myself that I was succeeding at living "younger than I am", I became attached to surprising people by pointing out the discrepancy between my chronological age and my apparent behavioral age. So far so good, right?

Well, it got to the point where it stopped serving me. Instead of reinforcing my youthfulness, it began to underscore my age. I used it to gain status by reminding people of my long tenure at my workplace. I began using my age not just to explain my energy level, but also to explain the times when I manifested a lack of energy. I began saying things like "I'm an old man!" and making "old man noises", such as groaning when getting out of a chair and complaining of my infirmities. Clearly, what had started as a good thing had permuted into its exact opposite; my age and frailty had replaced my youthfulness as an important part of the image I projected.

So, of course, that had to stop. It's difficult to retrain yourself to control what you say to people, but I think it's more difficult to realize that what you're saying doesn't serve you. So lately I've been trying to stay away from hitting people over the head with the fact that I'm older than most of the people I hang out with, and that I enjoy activities that are more typical of someone in their 20s than someone who is... well... my age (without specifying it any further, of course)! I'm not gonna give up referring to myself in the third person, tho!

This all is somewhat tangential to a philosophical issue that Inna and I had that frustrated her to no end. Forgive me, but this really does require that I talk a little bit about my age, in contrast to what I said above.

One of the "symptoms" of my preoccupation with my age was talking about what I'll call my infirmities: the little complaints that accumulate over time that let you know that you're not as young or as strong as you once were. Knowing back when I was 29 that these will only accumulate as I age, I formulated a philosophy of life that Inna found disturbing, but which I have always found particularly liberating. I began trying to pack as much experience, happiness, and joy into each day of my waning youth, prioritizing things that I wouldn't be able to do later in life as my body aged. I want to do as much as I can, so that when I'm older and not able to do many of these things, I'll have a rich life full of unique experiences to reminisce about. Somehow Inna construed this as horribly defeatist, in that I was setting my expectations of old age as simply inactive convalescence and waiting for death. I, on the other hand, think my philosophy will serve me well at any age, encouraging me to go out and do things for so long as I am physically able.

But that does beg the question of how long I expect to live, and my answer is one that really upset Inna. Trying to be as objective as possible, I don't think I will live to a very old age. I could, of course, be pleasantly surprised, and my life and financial planning will take that into account, but a dispassionate examination of the facts show that the probability is high that I'll die before I get old, fulfilling Mick Jagger's expressed youthful desire. Let's start with gender: I'm male, and men on average do not live longer than women. Add on top of that the fact that I live an urban lifestyle, with the accompanying respiratory issues, which are only exacerbated by my nightclub-going lifestyle. In addition to suffering the hazards of being an urban pedestrian, I'm also an urban cyclist, which engenders a whole cornucopia of potential risks. My family history is, of course, chock full of diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart disease, and so forth. Genetically, I'm at a clear disadvantage. And then, above all, there's the fact that I live alone and in a very isolated lifestyle; it should come as no surprise that, having no potential caretakers nearby, I might not survive incidents that others might easily overcome. I thnk that my family history paints a pretty stark prognosis, which is exacerbated by the fact that I live alone, with no one around to provide emergency assistance.

Looking on the other side of the equation, I do live in a city where I'm within moments of some of the best medical facilities on the planet. On top of that, I do seem to have a very strong constitution and the "infirmities" I do have are nowhere near as serious as those of anyone else I know. My cycling gets me regular exercise, and my weight and metabolism just can't be matched. I think I'm really blessed with great health, and enjoy it immensely. But I also know how quickly someone's health can turn around, and I know my own risk factors, which all lead me to believe that the prudent course is to expect that I will not live so long as most of my peers. Like I say, I'd be delighted to be proven wrong, but I also don't think it's rational to set my expectations in a way that, frankly, ignores the basic facts of the case. I think a reasonable, rational person would not expect me to have a longer-than-average, or even an average lifespan, given what I know of myself. I don't think that's defeatist or fatalist; it's just accepting the facts, and not living in denial. But whatever the case, I have every intention of fully enjoying and consciously experiencing each moment of life that I have left.

Having already developed a strong personal philosophy outside of any structured study, I bought the book "Philosophy for Dummies" in order to get an overview of the great philosophers and philosophies of history. I was hoping that I'd be exposed to some new ideas that I hadn't accounted for in my own philosophy, and/or find some more details about philosophers whose opinions coincided with the ones I've developed during my life.

While the book was a passable overview of the major questions of life, the author presented it in a very biased and judgemental way, which is unfortunate because I disagree with him on most issues. Still, I was able to think about my opinions in a more structured fashion, and come up with a few specific statements that I believe, even if they're no different from the beliefs I had going into the exercise. Here are some highlights:

We will probably never have the ability to answer some of life's biggest questions. We are in a situation where we must act based on limited information about what life is all about. So the most logical thing we can do is make conscious decisions and live our lives with the meaning that we choose to give them.
Similarly, because there is no inherent or apparent meaning to life, we have the freedom and opportunity to give our lives meaning and enjoy our lives while we're here. What matters is what gets you through your life with the most meaning and happiness possible.
Most people never enjoy the life they have now; they're always looking somewhere else, either in the future or the past, like a housewife who has misplaced her keys and is looking everywhere but where they are: right under her nose. This is exacerbated because we live in such an acquisitive culture, where you never seem to have "enough" of whatever it is you think will make you happy. Life is a process, and if you die never having reached a point where you're satisfied and content with your lot, you will have lived without ever having known happiness and contentment.
Philosophy in general cannot prove anything, nor even provide much evidence on which to base an opinion about life's biggest questions. Because it doesn't make sense to believe that something is an absolute without evidence, I don't believe there can be any universal definition of morality or good (i.e., I believe in moral relativism or ethical subjectivism). There are certainly ample examples of people violating commonly-held morality, while adhering to what they believe is right. Even Hitler believed that he was doing something moral and good.
I also believe in "amoral relativism". That is, you can define "evil" very simply and succintly as someone whose morals and values differ from your own. That's why, when people have philosophical difference, people are tempted to view the opposing viewpoint as "evil" or "amoral".
We like to think that we "decide" what we believe, but belief is not subject to direct control. While we might be able to indirectly influence it, belief is one of the few things that is equally emotional as it is rational, and sometimes we only discover what we believe when we're put in a position that tests or challenges our belief. In fact, although we like to think that we "know" what we believe, it is just as difficult to understand as it is to control, which is why so many people refer to examining their beliefs as a "process of discovery".
Humanity is the result of random evolution; we were not "created".
Although most people refuse to accept it, man is not significantly different than most animals. Even a cat or dog has a memory, makes decisions based on experience, can understand cause and effect and future consequences, and lives much the same kind of life as we have. The only significant difference I can see is in scale: mankind's capacity to learn and communicate is radically higher than that of other beasts.
When we die, like any animal, we die. There is no essense or spirit which survives when our brain activity ceases. Because death is and inevitable end of our being, and because we never live to experience it, it is illoigcal to fear death. On the other hand, it certainly is logical to fear suffering and pain, if those are part of your road to death. But death itself should be accepted as the ultimate, immutable fact of life. Accept it and move on and enjoy your life, motivated further by the knowledge that your portion of life is finite.
Because of their dispassionate opinions, history's existential philosophers have been viewed by the majority as depressed, defeatist, and negative. However, existentialism can also be a very positive, empowering philosophy. When you accept the fact that life is transitory, it makes that time much more precious an experience, and drives you to consciously enjoy every moment as it occurs. The world is full of wonder and beauty, and each precious fleeting moment should be savored while it is available to you. And when you accept that there is no God or other meaning to your life, it gives you the amazing freedom to define what your life will mean, and pursue your own happiness and fulfilment. For me, existentialism is clearly the road which is the most positive, empowering, and likely to lead to a happy and fulfilling life.

So "Philosophy for Dummies" didn't really add much beyond what I originally came to the exercise with, unless you could the insight that there's not much out there that is going to significantly change my world-view. And because the book completely dismissed existentialism and the essence of my personal philosophy, the next thing for me to do is conduct a more thorough study of the thinkers who have expressed ideas that run in a similar vein to my own.

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