On:
In: Blog, Memoir, Silly
With: 0 Comments

(A Six-Word Memoir for a slightly macabre monthly contest entitled “Bury Me Here In Six Words,” about where you want it all to end. #BuryMeInSix)

In this digital age where people seem to exist proportionally to–or not exist without–their visibility on podcasts, streams, Facebook pages, Twitter, or Pinterest: our lives have become digital. The Matrix didn’t takes us, we took to it. In the meantime, our growing population makes every patch of Earth more and more valuable to live on. It seems impractical to reserve a piece forever just to feed the worms for a bit.

I, too, have become a creature of the Internet: my work, my connection to my readers, to the world at large. Reality seeming less real without virtual representation; no one remembers the things I’ve done in life without recording them here. So, I’m thinking, why fight it? My body will be superfluous once I’m no longer using it. Everything worthwhile I have contributed will be patterns of data bits floating in servers somewhere. Let that be my legacy, my resting place, my gravestone.

Pray I leave behind good data.

On:
In: Blog, Memoir
With: 0 Comments

(Something new for me: a 50-word submission for fiftywordstory.com, featuring one of my idols, who I wrote a poem about here.)

“Being an aerospace engineer wasn’t enough: he had wings in his garage. Doped fabric tightening across spars on sawhorses. But a heart flutter snatched his license away. Family pictures reflected his torment, fettered to the ground. I cried when he left us, but happy he got his wings back.”

I was perhaps 6 or 7 when I first visited the garage. The wings were suspended at about eye level for me then and smelled of something worse than turpentine. But they fascinated me more than anything in my young, turbulent life and set the stage for my learning to fly a couple of decades later.