Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Your move....

Thursday at 8:30 a.m.: He opened his office, sat at his desk, turned on his computer, and banged his head on his keyboard. End of story.

Gray was in his mid-50s.

If I'd dreamed this up I would have made a penalty box, for sure; but death is beyond my imagination. I'm just here playing the game. I didn't make up the rules. To complain about that you'll have to talk to someone other than me.

You're going to go, too, friend, so consider it a matter of how you play it. It's not that bad, all things considered. We're free to choose how we live and how we don't. We get to make up our attitudes toward how we deal with the things we live with. I like to laugh and celebrate the morning sun. I like to think of myself as a fighting man, ready to take on the odds against me and to try, at least, to win a day. The gods don't care, and I don't care. I laugh, and we all die. I've lost another friend. I shoulder this burden. I'll take myself and my grief to our meeting tomorrow, Thursday evening, to the library at Vancouver, Canada, and I'll sit with others in the atrium outside Lugz coffee bar; and we will sit and talk, a thing fighting men and fighting women do. I'm not going to talk about my friend. His story is over. We'll talk about life and the living. I want you to join us. We'll join my friend later. For now it's for us to meet. We, the living.

VPL, atrium, 7-9:00 p.m. We wear blue scarves. Sit among us. Be alive with us.

4 comments:

CGW said...

Sorry about Gray, Dag.

Have a fruitful meeting nonetheless.

truepeers said...

I'm sorry Dag. I'll see you tonight and we'll talk about all you want.

Charles Henry said...

Sorry to hear about your loss, Dag.

Dag said...

Thanks for the condolences. We have a memorial at my place soon, and the memories will wash away the loss as we greet each other and celebrate the living.

There will be others who die in the course of time, and I'll mourn them when they go. But for each who dies there must be hope for those who live, and we can bring that to the living if we continue our work. Yes, even Muslims dead for nothing are a source of grief for us. No one should die needlessly. If we can bring forth reason and common decency to people who have no choices today, then we won't go pointlessly even if we have to go unwilling.

Gray was a good father, a good writer, a good friend. There are millions of others who could be the same happy kind of person if only they were free of Islam to be so. We can't bring back the lost but we might make a better life for those who are today oppressed by the evils of Islam and fascism. Life is for the living. Let's try to give it to them if they want it.