Back when, if you died on stage, you did it before a live audience.

            THE AUTOPSY

A mysterious beauty, the poem…

Suspicious, curious, fascinated,

we do what we must

to understand. But

analysis of beauty is not beautiful

There is scraping, cutting, and digging.

When whole, it is too hard to grasp.

The urge to take it to hand is too strong to resist.

We must insist. Must scrape, cut, dig

to make it comprehensible.

When at last we’ve seen enough

to satisfy our suspicion and curiosity,

we understand how grand a thing it was intact,

how terrible a thing we’ve done: The autopsy.

Sorry. We should at least have waited

until after it was dead.

But there are autopsies and then there are autopsies…

Two factors determine what constitutes a lifetime supply of anything:
1. how much you’ve got
2. how long you’ve got to live

Of course there are no other things that are not part of the universe.  So there is not “the universe and other things”; there’s the universe and that’s it.  There’s nothing else to talk about.  Anything we discuss is part of the universe, and a very small part at that.   For instance, the solar eclipse…

The solar eclipse looks like a big deal from here.  But universally speaking, it’s not a notable event.  There are stars forming, solar systems developing, galaxies exploding onto and off the scene.  Our solar eclipse is a tiny footnote in the intergalactic news of the day.   So as the moon comes moseying in front of the sun, try to keep things in perspective.

It didn’t take us long to find our niche…

The importance of unwritten rules.