The Positivity of Absolute Value

Once in a great while apparently, I enjoy getting back on this hog to fill my millions of readers in on what can only be described as a "007" life. And I know that each and every time I do, my listeners are so eager that they have moved on to biting their toenails due to an imminent lack of felanges.

So listen, I had a grandfather as of last week, and that is no longer the case. If you are, don't be sorry; I'm not. In my opinion, death is not some foreboding and relentless massacre of depressing feelings because you can't understand what happened. It is simply a sackful of memories and experiences that have been lost to the generations that followed, collected in what one hopes is a hospital bed, or home bed, or any bed really; which in turn will be deposited into the ground in either ash or flesh to rot with the rest of the earth. Nothing more.

And why does there need to be? Why do I have to know that my grandfather is now in a better place? Why should I believe that he had to give his entire life making the best of it that he could, only to reach this imaginary better place that no one knows exists? It pains me to think that there is a possibility that we aren't living to our full potential here because we are saving up for heaven. Like pathetic pre-pubescent boys from a small village in Honduras, who forfeit immediate pleasures of the flesh in order to afford a trip to Disneyland that they will never in their lifetimes make.

I'm just tired. So tired. Tired of everyone searching for reason in the afterlife, when they are so slow to apply that reason among the living. So slow to devote that same kind of energy to showing some respect to those around them. Don't misunderstand, I am no liberal searching for myself via Google on the internet. I would just love to get in my car, drive down the street and see one other person observing the logic of the traffic system that was supposed to be so wonderful. I want to go to work and have one person come in who isn't so completely oblivious to the fact that there are other human beings present, that they can't smell the festering bitterness growing on their own noses.

In short, I would love to live in a world where each person could even just realize that there is no cause, without effect. There is no such thing as a meaningless word. That there is room for civility and unity. And most of all, that projecting your personal idea of a guiding and all powerful deity onto the rest of us is clearly not the way to do it.

Keep your religion, your beliefs and your personal faith to yourself. For if you truly believed in all of the things you expound upon us, you would feel no need to say them out loud. You would be content in the knowledge of your own freedom. You would feel no need to try and convince me that I am wrong. You would live the life of comfort and bask in your own triumph over what you view as such a short existence, and never give a second thought as to whether I am worried about what happens to me when I die. Let me be. Only then may you begin to understand what it means to treat me like a human being.