h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yes! SA! The telekinesis miracle paragraph. heheh. Love it, the way you wrote it.

I love this celebration of the marvellous in the ordinary, the ordinary in the marvellous, the ... ah well, you know what I mean. .

Hmm, yes, death. I think about it all the time. I often have this realisation, which makes me go a bit breathless, just when I'm supposed to be breathing deeply, haha ....

... which is that being truly in the moment, and accepting the presence of death is, for me, from the same vein of inspiration.



. Yes, that's it, I've been dead for 14 billion years. . It wasn't as bad as one might expect.



I do fear death sometimes, 3 am in a neurotic panic fever, when everything seems fearful. It's just part of being human for me, neurotic panic fevers.

In these times I fear death as much as I fear illness, and cruelty, and injustice, and strangly scary things, and if there are mosquitos around that's when they appear just to add to the whine of hell. But the dawn always appears, and the fear passes.

Having been with the dying of both my parents in the last two years, I found I had no fear when the time came. I was too tired to think, so I somehow shelved any preconceptions or ideas I had about death, which was a complete freedom! Which I didn't plan. And the panic fever stayed away.

And ...

Oh, . Have to go. Laters ...

What I mean is people take pleasure in heading off to bed, snuggling up warm and dozing off. Now that process is inbuilt within us beyond our "thought" control ... whether we wake up later or not has nothing to do with that feeling of pleasure of snuggling up to sleep when the body and mind is tired. Anyway enough from me for a mo ... I'll be heading back into the land of in communicado for another week, shortly. I am still having finger issues - hopefully in another months time - I'll be able to use it again.

My previous comment was in response to Peanut's comment.

With regard death - the hardest thing to bear or come to terms with is the death of a loved one. This is my thoughts (actually I have mentioned it in Pastey's personal threads with regard his brother & I also mentioned it to Effers when she said she wouldn't know what to do if her parents died):

When a loved one dies and I think back to them I want my heart to be filled with happiness not sadness - of having known them, having learnt from them, having understood them as a person as I am a person. In 14 billion years of elapsed time, in the immensity of space, amongst the billions of people, I knew them, shared time and experiences with them. Feeling sadness is natural but it is a selfish emotion - support the others that are feeling sad, and cherish the life. This is just my opinion. Ultimately we are all individuals and as individuals have to deal with it and make "sense" of it.

Right I am going to have a soak in a bath and do some reading

Yes! And sleep is amazing! What a species we are, I feel a miracle paragraph coming on! Every fifteen hours or so, we have to lie down and go into an altered state for a few hours. heheh. Now that's a miracle. . Awesome.

Yes, 14 billion years! That's amazing, eh? Fourteen billion years???? What does that look like? I can't remember most of my yesterdays, , so fourteen billion years .... yowzum.

To me, sadness is more like a private emotion, when it comes to grieving for a loved one. But it's good to share it also, if things are too much to bear. I like that privacy, time to interpret it in my own way.

Interesting thoughts, and thanks for all the postings.

Yes, 14 billion years! That's amazing, eh? Fourteen billion years???? What does that look like? I can't remember most of my yesterdays, , so fourteen billion years .... Yowzum

and we came up with tartan underwear and all

a big to MVP, saw you pop up,

fancy some apple spiced wine?

All this thinking about time put me in mind of this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2WGGNiC8f4

Yes please! hic. As if I haven't had enough. .

mvp will see that we are talking about tartan underwear, death and quite a lot of other things, and she might run straight back to France. .

I had some tartan pyjamas once. They were lovely. Is this interesting? No!

I guess the cavemen quivered at the mystery of it all, although they didn't have tartan pyjamas. Or did they???? ...

Hah! Another song and lyrics wonderment of that music mystery again. I love it, Mister D. When you only got 100 yrs to live, music makes it sweeter.

I'd not heard of Five For Fighting, the author of the 100 yrs song. Interesting.

Five for Fighting is the stage name of American singer-songwriter John Ondrasik (born Vladimir John Ondrasik III).

I like this knowledge. Thanks!

Be good to have a 111 or jnr or something after one's name. Cactuscafe IV. Hmm

He's a talented fellow, is Mr Ondrasik - and very active in charitable work.

He's written one of my favourite songs, which is 'Superman'.

I'm going for Peanut the forty secondth

*tries it on for size*

*wiggles a bit, practices signing *

mmm

this is going to take some time

I am a forty two

a forty second

42nd

yes, what's that in roman numerals, hopefully not to unwieldly with a or a

Music is to musical instrument as life is to matter.

forty secondth, definitely decided

how to write that, shorthand like

still working on it...

XLII - 42

Or, XXXXII.

oh definitely XXXX11

and can be delightfully got and lost in translation

Hi, I am back and glad to see you all again.

I haven't had time to read all the thread so, at the moment, it seems a bit mystifying. Death and tartan underwear? It sounds like the title of a jokey whodunnit.

I'd better and do some reading before I comment properly.

I'm still a bit confused. I need some of Peanut's perculiar

That's better. So, Peanut- I hope Hiccup has recovered from her asthma and that your mother is making progress

Dmitri - I loved your defective detective story, but got a bit lost at the end. I have failed to understand something, probably.

Cactuscafe - I've been to Mexico and climbed some Mayan pyramids. Some of them are very steep and one or two of our party found they got vertigo and had difficulty going down. Have you read D H Lawrence's story 'The Woman Who Rode Away' ?

SA. I like Teilhard de Chardin's idea of a 'hive mind'. I played around with the idea of a GoodWill, which I saw as a force operating through the world, maybe through the universe, inspiring people to bring about good ends.Not sure if it works though.

Hi minorvogonpoet,

I haven't come across the concept of "GoodWill" - was that something from the writings of Teilhard de Chardin?

Before hearing of Teilhard de Chardin (which I confess I don't know much about), I had heard of some of the “wacky” ideas of a few university professors, Frank Tipler (physics), John Barrow (maths – Cambridge), the late John Wheeler (physics – princeton) … who had developed the idea of the "omega point" and ideas of teleology (the “future” creating the past). Only later did I realise that many of the ideas were developed from (or paralleled) de Chardin.

I think the Good Will was my idea - more influenced by Star Wars than Teilhard de Chardin!

I don't really believe in God but I don't think the Christian church has helped by depicting him as an old man sitting on a cloud. All I could believe in was a kind of force flowing through the universe inspiring life and good deeds. People could draw on that force and, by working together with others, could achieve good things.

But I'm being terribly serious and risk upsetting the Daydreamers.

I pick up tricks from all over the place - tricks about thinking and analysis. One trick I learnt while taking A level Biology with regard animal behaviour. We were told that the internal aspects of animal behaviour was like a black box and the best way of analysis was to look at the inputs and the outputs. This same trick can be used as one way of analysing religion - all beliefs go into the black box - and you look at the inputs and the outputs. You can do that with individual humans - look at their behaviour - sometimes their beliefs are linked to their behaviour and sometimes it isn't. Ultimately its the behaviour that is important in terms of relationships.

Looking back at my comment above I am not really sure of the point I was trying to make - maybe I am in one of those daydreams - where everything is vague and bendy. Maybe what I mean is that for me I don't really mind what you believe - the main thing that concerns me is behaviour (e.g. are you going to kill me?).