New Year, Old Battles

January 10, 2026 8:30am

“… I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all my life’s decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether this death comes next week or thirty years from now, this consciousness gives my life another breadth… “— Andre Lorde

I used to have belief to counter these frequent duels with death; now that too is lost and all that is left is a solitary journey across a cold and arid windswept plain.

12:14pm

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours cutting up a disc I bought used 35 years ago. It was in bad shape so I used a torch and a 9″ angle grinder with a cutting wheel to take out the useable metal – the rest will go to a metal recycler in LaGrange. Why do I mention this?…… to point out that although futility rides my shoulder whispering to me constantly, life must go on – so I salvage metal for some future welding project.

The Sea and the Soul

January 11, 2026 3:21pm

My wife determined that we would all read Moby Dick together so she bought copies for each family and suggested we could discuss it as we go…. a kind of in-house book club. This made all the more appropriate since eldest daughter and husband are in Granada fitting their catamaran for a six-month voyage back north.

Moby Dick was never high on my “to be read list” but it has turned out to be surprisingly interesting. Here’s an example….(note that Bulkington is a sailor Ishmael met on land and then saw next at the helm of the Pequod.)

“Know ye now Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless indefinite as God- so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than to be ingloriously dashed upon the lee even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing-straight up leaps thy apotheosis” – Herman Melville, MOBY DICK, Chapter 23

Now your interpretation may be different, but I see a man cut loose from all mooring and adrift on an undulating sea of morality, philosophy, and civilization. He wants the sea more than comfort.

The Examining Table

January 24, 2026 2:18pm

We’re facing a winter storm today and tomorrow followed by days of single digit temperatures. There is a quarter inch of snow on the driveway – they say we’ll get 6-12 inches by tomorrow night.

Mornings are the worst. I lie in bed thinking about the futility of a life that I repeatedly dissect on my examining table. Each part is separated and left puzzle-like on the stainless-steel surface. I try to understand the pieces, but they don’t make sense. What did I want? What was possible? Could it have been any other way?

Don’t get me wrong, I have lived a better and more fulfilled life than the vast majority of humans on this planet. Still, I look back and wonder. What did any of it mean?

I see faces of the dead and people I knew long ago. I ask, did they also feel this way and come to the same conclusions?

The fluorescent light over the examining table buzzes as I peer at the pieces that made up this inscrutable life and I realize, I was never who I thought I was.

Something…. or Nothing?

January 30, 2026 9:25am

Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize in Physics 2020, proposed his Conformal Cyclic Cosmology to explain the origin of the big bang. I understand this theory to hold that on scales of 10 to the 100th earth years, the universe cycles through creation, growth, decline, and destruction. This mirrors the Hindu creation myth in the Rig Veda. The Hindus believed that the Hiranyagarbha or Cosmic Egg repeatedly expanded and contracted in creation and destruction.

Neither Penrose nor the Rig Veda explain the foundational physics question: How did something come from nothing?