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Wednesday, February 15, 2006

HI. Beggining transmission. Beware of pink laser beams. Beware of concepts and ideas. Language is a virus.

My wife created a blog. Only two of us were given the link. She was hoping for comments. So to do the supportive, husbandly thing, I had to register as a blogger to post to her site. She could probably change a setting and let anyone -- bloggers, non-bloggers, wizards, muggles, aliens, hybrids, spirits, principalities and powers -- all post to her blog thing. But she hadn't. So I registered. And now (gulp), I've become a blogger (yuck).

A writer I hope I have been. At least intermittently. A blogger? Feh. Who cares. The title seems like a badge of honor for those non-conformist types who all dress alike.

Though by no means a technofile, I've had enough experience in on-line communications to know that most of them end badly. Too many souless users sit out there behind the twin shields of a key board and anonymity and look for victims upon which to spew the voluminous pools of bile produced by their diseased inner organs (particularly that really nasty one lodged inside of their cranium). So please abide by momma's old rule and "if you can't think of anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." I'm not looking for an argument. An audience I'll take if I can get one. And if it's well-behaved. No hecklers please.

Thought for the day: Civilization is a mirage. It's nothing but a thin veneer propped up by the desperate wishes and feverish hopes of hordes of self-deluded and willfully blind people who just want law and order to hold together long enough for them to be able to buy that new lexus and find out who wins the next season of American Idol. If you squint your eyes tight enough, spin around three times before a mirror in a dark room and click on the light, for an instant you'll see how close we are to descending into chaos. In case you haven't noticed, I'm a pessimist. Particularly lately. Tomorrow it will be two weeks since the husband of a friend - a man who spent 30 years crusading for social and political causes and loving a wife and daughter and stepson - suddenly got the urge to find the highest bridge in a 50 mile vicinity of his physical location and find out what would happen when he stepped of it. C'est la vie.

Thought for the night: If you sit quietly in a peaceful room with early morning sunlight streaming in and hold a sleeping child in your lap, if you breath just the right way and you've been eating right and treating your fellow planet dwellers with decency and grace, you can get a glimpse of how close we are to something beautiful. Not civilization, but something that doesn't concern itself with regulations and boundaries and property rights and IRAs and the dow jones and polling results, but something much, much better.

So in theory, humans are capable of incredible goodness (by the grace of God). In practice, I have my doubts.