Thoughts like these have passed through my head for decades. Could be it's time for Emil to bring them out in the open. As usual I don't know where this will go. Good chance it'll be erased when I'm done. Done that before. Not fun but when something sucks, it sucks.
Woke up this morning thinking about what it'd be like if I hadn't. As far as I know, not waking up happens but once in a lifetime and with luck, once is enough. Anyhow, death was on my mind. Not unusual when you're gettin' on in years. Not unusual at any time for that matter. Dying's the one thing I know for sure will happen. S'pose there's a comfort in knowing but I can't say I feel all that comforted when I think of it. But that's not the gist of where I wandered from there.
What may or may not happen after I die is the interesting part. Anyhow that's where the thought left me till I was back from shopping down in Grand Marais and eyeballin' the loom of a paddle I was carving. Been into making paddles lately. Don't have a need for more than three or four but they're fun to carve. Start out with boards, saw 'em into strips, glue 'em up and carve 'em out. Carve's a fine word. Sounds like I go at it with knives, spokeshaves and planes. All hands on and eyeball true. Well, that's partly true. Throw in the band saw and belt sander and you're gettin' close. Still, it's all handwork and the finished product is eyeball true. Also's a good builder of concentration. Can't let my mind wander too far or I'll just have a little more kindling for the wood stove.
I've got a pretty good idea what'll happen to my body. Become one with the worms and microbes, eventually, if I'm lucky, the left nut of a moose. But the pea brain that lives in my head, the one who pays attention so the saw band stays outside the line, most anything might happen to that fella after his body craps out. Maybe nothing, maybe on a cloud honkin' away on a kazoo. Frankly I kind of doubt the latter. Maybe all of me'll break up and become parts of other things. It's a big universe out there, over time a person could get spread out pretty thin. Maybe all the way to nothing. So maybe a person's not completely dead till the last atom breaks up into something else. Back when I was a kid, my old man'd occasionally ask me what I was thinkin'. Instead of the embarrassing truth I'd usually say, "Nothin'." Could be I already knew where my future lay.
Most every trip into town I pay a visit to the library. The printed word's important to me. 'Course there's words and there's words. Good writing makes me stop and think for a while. Pause a moment and stare off into the woods lost in thought. Sometimes it's just a sentence that could as easily have been left out of the story. Like a mention of a plains Indian tribe, could have been the Comanches, and their belief on time. Seems they figured time never moved or didn't exist in the first place. That it's always now, people and things move but not time. Had that thought myself. Don't know how Einstein and all the physicists would take to the no time idea. Same goes for the four dimensions they claim we live in. All those things, length, width, depth and time are just ideas. Just our human way of explaining the real world. Adding onto it. Not the same as running a doug-fir sliver into my index finger when I'm checking the round of a canoe paddle loom. Damn that smarts. Doesn't mean our scientific way of explaining things ain't apropos but does mean it's a human thing and may or may not have any relation to anything. Except maybe my band saw and all the other tools I'm using that wouldn't exist unless we were figuring stuff out mentally.
Or for that matter, all the contraptions we use to make war. Like the one my nephew Archie is caught in the middle of. I've heard shit happens and not all of it can be used to help plants grow.
No comments:
Post a Comment