[CaptainCrunch]

You know all joking aside, we all have our concerns about death, sure we can be externally cavalier about it. There's nothing after life, we return to the soil, we live, we love, we die, we fade from memory and then as the others around us go, we vanish.

One morning we all wake up and we look at the road behind us, and then turn and look at the road ahead of us and realize that there are more miles behind us then ahead of us. Then we take a look at that road, is it strewn with wreckage, the bodies of people that we've wronged? Or is that road clear? What's on the road ahead, does it end with a huge black abyss, a vacuum that eventually sucks you in and crushes you with the gravitational forces of oblivion? Or does the road branch off and when we go, its like turning off of the interstate and travel in another direction? Or does it end at a truckstop where we stop and have a piece of pie served by a waitress named flo, and we sit back, relax and look at the journey behind us?

I don't know, all I know is at some point we stand at the edge of that abyss, and wonder if that's it, we fall into darkness.

Because to be honest, except for a select few, the billions or trillions that have died since man rose out of the primordial muck and picked up a stick have faded, its like they never existed. Maybe they lived a good life, maybe they lived a life full of evil, but at the end, they're dead, and we don't know their names, or their parents, or for the most part their descendants.

And its easy to simply say, we die, we're dirt, that's it, but merely accepting that end of the journey goes against human nature which is defined by one question, "Is this all there is?"

And if there's nothing, then why do we have a sense of fair play and compassion, and good versus evil. If there are no consequences then why not f%%k everyone over, steal, cheat, lie and kill, at least that way you wouldn't fade and be forgotten.

I look at the mass shooting in Orlando, and the Sandy Hook Killings and other ones, and it makes sense. You see, you can lie to a person and say, kill as many as you can for a righteous cause and you will go to paradise, hell maybe your victims will go there too because they're innocent and victims, and maybe that makes you feel better. But I believe that these psychos do it because it becomes impossible to forget them, someone will remember that person for years and decades as the person that snuffed out your mom or dad or grandparent that you never met for example.

We all strive to make a difference, good or bad, that's our legacy that maybe makes it easier to die and go nowhere but the dirt. We all ask the same question, who will be saddened by our loss? Who will take a lesson from how I lived and how I died, and then you face the inevitable, that in 4 or 5 years, unless they walk by your grave or see your picture, or hear an innocuous comment that stirs a memory, that it will be as if you don't exist.

I remember reading a biography about Stalin, and the prevailing theory is that beyond an apparent sociopathic mental illness, Stalin like all of the hardcore communist dictators believed they had to attain maximum change in their lifetime because once they die, they're dead and their works will be all that you remember them by, and that's their reward for a life of ruthless change.

I also remember watching a movie once that described hell not as a fire filled pit with demons dismembering you daily but as a place in the shadows where you are denied love from god and denied love from anyone else, a solitary confinement where all you can do is face your sins and beg for forgiveness and have nobody there to absolve you of your guilt, whereas heaven was love and where you have no ability or need to look behind you and feel guilt about anything in your live.

But to me the sobering thought when you stand at the abyss at the end of that road and stare into the blackness that if you haven't made a mark, none of this really matters.

Its all just darkness, and while your dead and if there's nothing you don't care, when you're alive you should care.

So at the end of a long rambling post when I say that this life is literally hell, it is because of how we march towards the inevitable oblivion and most of us fade into the piles of dead people that nobody remembers or cares about, we become a marker in the ground and over the year the fancy inscription fades, and the weeds grow because it's not tended to.