I’ve gone and got to G. What shall I gab about? I’ve got it!
GUNS, GOD AND GRAVESTONES
Any of you who may feel that all three of the above are connected, haven’t been paying attention to the filing system inside my head.
I don’t give a shit what the Nervous-Nellie, conservative, reactionary do-gooders claim. Guns don’t kill people! Guns don’t kill people any more than hammers build houses. People kill people when the wrong people get ahold of guns. I know of guns that are older than I am, and the only thing they’ve ever done is put holes in pieces of paper.
The wrong people get hold of guns when gutless Gus thinks he hears a burglar, and hides a rifle under the bed, and his 4-year-old ‘pretends’ to shoot the neighbor kid – when an armed Security Guard is too lazy to store his gun in his house, or at least in his car’s trunk, and lets his girlfriend and her 6-year-old use the car, and it slides out from under the front seat – when a lady shopper leaves a loaded, cocked pistol in her purse, next to her child in a shopping cart.
We don’t need ‘Gun Control.’ We need people control! We need background checks, waiting periods, licensing, gun handling and storage safety training, and – instead of emotional, hand-wringing histrionics – an ongoing campaign like we have for smoking in public, or drunk driving, to get people to think, (Could happen) and take their guns, and their control of them, seriously.
OH GOD
God is!….And all the rest of you are wrong.
In the beginning, God created Man – and immediately, every Man created the God which best suited his selfish needs and mistaken beliefs.
The Muslim God is different from the Jewish God. The Jewish God is not the same as the Christian God. The Roman Catholic God is not the same as the God of the Greek Orthodox Church – and neither is the same as the Russian Orthodox God.
The Catholic God differs from the Protestant God, and the God of each of over 42,000 Protestant sects varies widely and wildly from the Catholics’– and from each other. In every case, at least one of them must be wrong.
‘Your God’ is a mean, vicious, vengeful, violent God, who would torture me for eternity for respecting all humans and their rights, even if some of them are gay, whereas ‘my God’ is loving, forgiving and inclusive.
The God of the insecure egotists, ‘sees every sparrow fall,’ but they fail to notice that the Bible doesn’t say anything about Him actually doing anything about it. If a greater being created the universe, It is not the God of the egotists’ dreams. It regards this little ball of rock called Earth like an ant-farm, mildly interesting at times, but not worth interfering with, no matter how much they vainly pray.
None of us have enough brains to know what an infinite ‘God’ thinks and wants, but too many of us also don’t have enough brains to keep our mouth shut, and prove our ignorance.
ENGRAVED IN STONE
I’m not going to get stoned – even though it sometimes looks like I am, when I write.
My maternal grandparents lie side-by-side in a double plot, in the old section of my home-town cemetery. Someone in the family must have had some money. A four-foot high white marble obelisk sits on a sandstone plinth at their heads, with all biographical data professionally and artistically carved in.
Ever the prepared planner, my Mother arranged and paid for all funeral details long before she and Dad died. They (which may mean she) opted for cremation. They purchased a single plot, and had their urns buried at each of the top corners. There’s room for four more urns – two on the sides, and two at the bottom.
In the new cemetery section, the rule is that all gravestones must be flush with the earth, for ease of groundskeeping. They put two small sandstone slabs (about 8” square) over the urns, with only their names, and the word ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, no dates of birth or death.
Not exactly welcoming the inevitable, but like Mom, knowing that it should be planned for, I recently had a conversation with my younger brother. Since there’s room at Mom and Dad’s plot, did he plan to be cremated and buried with them?
No more religious than I am, he surprised me with a vehement refusal. No cremation for him! He plans to be buried the old-fashioned way – embalming, body in a coffin, coffin in the ground. He’s going to buy a single plot, and have a stone about a quarter of the surface area laid over him.
Like my Mother, I am not a believer in physical resurrection. I also want to be cremated. The whole process, from beginning to end (actually, from my ending, to the delivery of the urn by Amazon drone) is about $2000/$2500.
I see no reason to rob my heirs of what little I can leave them, by purchasing a plot of land I don’t need, and a chunk of stone that, eventually, no-one will visit. I will be given, probably to my daughter, as a bagful of bonemeal fertilizer that she can sprinkle in her garden, and I will be resurrected as a rosebush, or a lilac tree. (Although, with my luck, I’ll come back as crabgrass.) That’s the true ‘Circle of Life!’
PHOTO PROMPT © 
Archon's Den 