Non Sequitur & Babble

Another Non Sequitur, another cat joke. Yeah, Larry, that’ll teach you for not being a cat person. I remember once talking to a fellow employee about our cats. She said, yes, she had cats when she was growing up on a Midwestern farm. They called them kickin’ cats because that’s what they did whenever one got in their way. And now I hope she too has to go to a cat person’s heaven and gets turned away, maybe even kicked in the butt by the kitty gatekeeper.

So much sadness in the news these days, too much insanity. Still too much war in the world, too much terrorist activity, too many sad tales of child abuse, too much bullying. The Glee cast paid tribute to the fallen Finn, Cory Monteith, and I wept along with them as Lea Michele sang “Make You Feel My Love” in memory of his passing, tears simply rolling down her cheeks as she sang, tears rolling down mine as I listened to her. Then there’s the woman who drowned her three kids and just gave birth to her fourth child in a psychiatric ward. What chance does that poor fourth child have in this world? And why didn’t we as a society require that the woman have her tubes tied? All right, all right, I know we can’t Big Brother such an edict. But how can we or God allow such tragic insanity to continue? Adrian Peterson, star running back for the Minnesota Vikings, heard today that his two-year-old son just died from a beating. The boyfriend of Peterson’s ex-girlfriend beat the two-year-old to death. A two-year-old. A sixteen-year-old in Phoenix recently gave birth to a girl in a public restroom and then threw the baby out the window. Twenty-seven impoverished migrants, on a boat bound from Africa to Europe, drowned in the Mediterranean. Joe Bell, father of the Oregon gay teenager who killed himself after being bullied by classmates, was himself killed during his cross-country walk to honor his son, struck by a semi on a Colorado highway. The list goes on and on, like some kind of bad cosmic joke. As I approach the end of my life, I realize more and more just how inconsequential all our lives are. It’s not that our lives aren’t worth living. It’s just that the marks we leave behind are so insubstantial, tiny ripples in an eternal sea. We die and the world moves on. I read all the time and I have all these words in my head, other people’s words. I know the lyrics to most of the Great American Songbook and can play them back in my head, word for word, thousands of songs. I find that I’m writing in my head during most of my waking hours, and, I swear, I’m even doing it in some of my sleeping hours, or that twilight time between waking and sleeping when memory is at its clearest. Why have I spent my whole life stuffing words into my head only to die and have them vanish along with me? I don’t know. But now I think I’m babbling.