Reflections of an Enquiring Mind

Several years ago, the suicide of a friend threw all who knew him for a loop as it was, for us at least, totally unexpected. As a consequence I started thinking quite a lot about what is left behind after we die. Unlike Curl-Snout, Mohandas Gandhi, or Saddam Hussein, very few will leave much by way of historical record. So, what immortality is there for us common folk? Next to nothing, comes the sobering response.

When my mother died, it bothered me a great deal that she left no written record of her life. No explanations. No justifications. No clues about the mysteries she embodied or why she lived the life she did. That she answered none of her children’s questions bitterly disappointed me in so many gut-level ways. Over the years I became determined I would not suffer that fate with my own family and friends by leaving no record of what I thought or experienced.

Consider the despondent note struck by the Psalmist: I am forgotten like the unremembered dead.

Does that resonate with anyone? Yet, despite that prescient sentence, it took me about two years to get started on this particular task. Not that setting up this blog took that long but the time was spent in deciding whether it was an appropriate move. Anyone who has sampled the myriad blogs out there knows what I mean.

Of course, the idea of being acknowledged hardly breaks new theoretical ground. Over 3,000 years before Christ the people of K’M’T had the same insight and invented Isis and Osiris to banish the Black Void with the balm of life after death. And chiseled their names on every handy block of granite so posterity would have no choice but to confront their version of reality and the transcendental. Not to mention their version of history. But that’s the stuff of pseudo-scientific chronicle and not purely personal record.

In this blog, I’ll be writing about the things that have occupied my life. The topics are varied but include Florida, Geoscience, Humor, Life as Lived, Personal Reflections, and Urban Planning among several others. The question is, if I do leave a written record, will anyone be interested enough to read the assorted and sordid chicken scratchings? And if they do, why on God’s green Earth would they give a rat’s ass? A better question would be: even if they were so inclined to read it, why is their opinion important to me? With your indulgence, that’s a tough one I’ll duck right now.

In simple truth, those puzzles have no easy solutions. The only important fact is that I care enough to write about what I have lived and thought versus what people assumed I lived (for example many of my “friends” in Chesterfield are blissfully unaware of my being a vegetarian or having a PhD). For a literate few the urge for justification and self-elucidation is perhaps second only to that of self-preservation. If only on a purely intellectual plane. On a deep-seated, almost visceral level, I need to set the record straight so that someone will know about my life. No doubt it’s a rather pathetic attempt to hold back the Black Void while claiming specialness. But it’s all I can offer the glinty-eyed critics, forever demanding: “Why?”

The shadow hanging over me is one I cannot shake. Why, really, do I bother? Not just about whether I will be remembered after my death because I know I won’t. It’s about everything else. The whole enchilada. Perhaps it’s as simple as not trusting my progeny to be the custodians of the truth, as I saw it, and of my life, as I lived it. Because so much was intentionally kept from them. And from most everyone else as well.

Regardless of the opinions of others, my life was never an open book easily read or interpreted. Hey, that’s me, one complicated motherfucker. A fairly intelligent and well-educated fellow who swears like a trooper. An early believer who turned agnostic/atheist and after decades away returned to the Church only to become enraged by watching how the hierarchy protected the pederasts in their midst and how cavalierly and contemptuously they have dismissed women and those who questioned their patriarchal rights to be the only ones capable of using their brains. A PhD who hates it when his wife refers to him with people she wants to impress as “Doctor.” An unrepentant leftist who detests conservatism and many conservatives and steadfastly refuses to concede that a political ideology focused on suppressing others — whether through religion, class/wealth, or sexual orientation — has any basis in morality.

Perhaps this inchoate desire to share is as simple as caring about what we as individuals have done and what we’ve believed in this complex world. The awful alternative is that we lead not the examined life and wind up stark raving mad, like that troubling enigma, Nietzsche. Or we kill ourselves, like that poor bastard Jack S.

The point of this overly long and wordy introduction can be summed up in the lyrics of a popular song from many, many years ago. Like Peggy Lee, a torch singer from the fifties all too few remember, I catch myself asking, “Is that all there is?” The materials that follow form the only meaningful response I offer to still that plaint.

Okay. Why the specific blog title? Because footprints in the dust can disappear in a matter of seconds. Which is how long I’ll be upon this Earth if you take the long-term view (as I do as a once want-to-be geologist). Far less than a hundred years from now no one will know or will have ever heard my name. Yes, the title seems right on the money.


Ashes to ashes, dust to dust are we all.