my mind begins to hum...

[Ugly Dougly]

Αυτή είναι μια υπέροχη εικονογράφηση ενός μύθου. Παιδικό βιβλίο του 19ου αιώνα; ή στις αρχές του 20ου;

[Simon of the Playa]

[media]

[Ugly Dougly]

[Ugly Dougly]

[Simon of the Playa]

escape route.

[Ugly Dougly]

[media]

[Ugly Dougly]

[media]

[GreyCoyote]

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral.

You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen.

Aaron Freeman

[theCryptofishist]

Ah, good. My nephew will come in handy, with that fancy Oxford Ph.D. Although, I intend to out-live my mother, she's buried (well, burned) one child, and, yes, I know it was the human condition for most of our existence, but one's enough.

[Ugly Dougly]

[Roberto Dobbisano]

im afraid i cant help you, but perhaps my cousin, "answer man", can.

[H.G.Crosby]

.

[Ugly Dougly]

A Song of the Naked Lands - Robert E. Howard

You lolled in gardens where breezes fanned
The blossom's shivering shard;
But we were bred in a naked land
Where life was bitter hard.

You raped the grapes of their purple soul
For your wine cups brimming high;
We stooped to the dregs of the muddy hole
That was bitter with alkali.

And you grew flabby and round of limb,
Short of nerve and breath;
But we grew rugged and lean and grim
In our naked grip with Death.

Silk was too harsh for your dainty skin,
Red wine too poor for your drought;
We hunted the holes that the rain stood in,
And stripped the wolf for our clout.

Round were your bellies, soft your hand,
Soft with the fat of the earth;
Yours was the wealth of a smiling land,
Ours the desert's dearth.

You sang beneath the locust tree,
Forgetful of hunger and hate:
'It has always been, it will always be!'
Even then we were at your gate.

You lolled by fountain and golden hall
Until that frenzied morn
When we burst the gates and breached the wall
And cut you down like corn.

We reaped the yield and we plowed the field
With red and dripping shares,
And you could not fight and you could not run,
You could only die like hares.

Grim was the barter, red the trade,
With dripping swords for coins,
And your women screamed in the trampled sand
With bruised and bleeding loins

Skilled was the brain and skilled the hand
That shaped the stubborn stone,
But the brain spilled on the bloody sand
When iron split the bone.

The hand that traced the gilded frieze,
That scrolled the written page,
It could not turn the driven steel,
Backed by the primal rage.

Of what avail the harp and lute,
Gemmed girdle and purple cloak,
When the dripping axe was smiting home
In the flame and the blinding smoke?

Blood smeared your satin and silk and lace.
You heard you children moan,
And your elders howled in the market place
Where we stripped them skin from bone.

And where your bearded judges sat
And bade men live or die,
A naked slayer roared and waved
A bloody scalp on high.

Over the ruins arched and spired
The billowing smoke cloud waves;
And you who lived when the sword was tired,
You live but as our slaves.

Our hard hands clutch your golden cups,
Our rough feet crush your flowers;
We stable our horses in your halls,
And all your wealth is ours.

We have doffed our wolfskin clouts for silks,
We wear them clumsily,
Our eyes are bleak, our beards unshorn,
Our matted locks stream free.

But our sons will trim their beards and hair,
Don cloaks of crimson hue;
They will take your daughters to their beds,
Till they grow soft as you.

They will trade their freedom for harps and lutes,
Discard the bow and the dart;
They will build a prison of satin and gold,
And call it Culture and Art.

They will lie in the lap of a smiling land,
Till its rusts unman and rot them,
And they scorn their blood, and the calloused hand,
And the fathers who begot them.

But our brothers still dwell in the sun-seared waste
And their sons are hard and lank;
They will hunt the wolf-pack that we chased,
And drink the water we drank.

The hungers we knew they too will know,
The scars of fangs and of briars;
In the rocks where they crouch when the sandstorms blow
They will find the marks of our fires

They will know the hungers that once we had,
While the stream of centuries runs,
Till they burst from the desert, hunger-mad,
To slaughter our slothful sons.

[theCryptofishist]

Descriptions of "imaginary friends".

[Simon of the Playa]

[media]

[Ugly Dougly]

[Simon of the Playa]

[media]

[Ugly Dougly]

[Roberto Dobbisano]

eat em' up.

[Ugly Dougly]

Aunt Yemaya

[Simon of the Playa]

.

[Ugly Dougly]

[Simon of the Playa]

[media]

[Roberto Dobbisano]

wait for "its"...

[Simon of the Playa]

[media]

[Ugly Dougly]

Nature will remove your utopia and replace it with her own.

[Simon of the Playa]

[media]

[Ugly Dougly]

[Ugly Dougly]

[media]

[Roberto Dobbisano]

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.