life is short

One of the online comics I read regularly is PVP by Scott Kurtz [Player Vs. Player, a geek/dork comic about characters who work at a gaming magazine. And a sometimes-invisible troll.]. The strip hasn't updated recently, which is odd [especially since he is in the middle of a mega-important thread in which two characters are *this* close to getting engaged...at Comic-Con, with the guy dressed up as Han Solo :^) ]. So I checked the site blog to see what was up with the delay, and found these:

http://www.pvponline.com/blog/3478/ringo
http://www.pvponline.com/blog/3480/friendly-dolphins
http://www.pvponline.com/blog/3487/durham-nc
http://www.pvponline.com/blog/3489/one-thousand-embraces

Poor guy. I especially choked up at him writing "I've never lost a friend this close before. I have no point of reference. I'm a huge-obese asshole and I have no heart problems and Mike did everything right and he's dead. How the hell do I reconcile that?"

<sigh>

It's funny. Just when I start to sink back into complacency, into that state of denial that all humans have to live in so we can function day-to-day, the universe seems to smack me upside the head [with varying degrees of force] to remind me that life is short. Anything can happen at any time, it's not all under your control.

I'm glad I took this time off to be with my parents. It's so tempting to pretend that we still have years together, since the imminent demise we thought we were facing two years ago didn't happen. Things like what Scott Kurtz is going through remind me to not take it for granted, to remember that we are born dying, that *all* time is borrowed time.

Years ago [during the "dark days of Stacey"], I found a card that I framed [and is now hanging in my bedroom]. It says "We have no say over the hand dealt us in life, but we do have a lot of control over how this hand is played. We are all responsible for bringing out the meaning of our own lives in each moment that we live. Remember each moment happens only once and can never be retrieved again."

I deliberately hung it in a spot where I would see it every day. It takes me back to my FTP days, when I was told that the root password for the west coast servers was "beertruck", because the admin could get hit by a beer truck stepping off a curb tomorrow, and someone needed to have the password. That silly little thing really stuck with me...even now, I try to live my life by the 'beertruck philosophy'.

Life is short...