I lost my best friend and 31 year companion about 19 months ago. So this will be a memorial.

We met at 19. Oddly enough, we were both at a party the night before, in a small apartment, and didn't run into each other.

The night we met, her friends (and my friends, we just didn't know each other yet) invited me specifically because I smoked pot, and they didn't know anyone else who did. My wife, Kat, was a lovable person. She was petite, and many people made the assumption that she was weak. I promise you, she was not. In their circle of friends, I was the only one that smoked (which is really hilarious, since in my circle, I smoke the least).

We met. I acted like an ass (I mean, I was a 19 year old male, in the 90s, so that was really expected). I forget the actual chain of events, but she wound up over my shoulders. We had our first kiss when she was upside down. That probably defined more than I knew.

We spent the rest of the party together. Nothing complicated, just talking and getting to know each other. We shared a small bedroom for the evening. We didn't get physical but talked and kissed for like the next 6 hours or so. It was a beautiful evening.

There was no second date. From that night, we were together. I'm not going to pretend we didn't have rough spots. A committed relationship takes work and time and conversation. It was amazing. We grew up together, not like a childhood fantasy, but we were adults and leaned on each other.

We both came from poverty and lack of power (hers was far worse than mine). We compared our pasts and clung to each other to find something better. Most of our lives were spent doing the opposite of what we were taught by family. We both knew our scars and decided a different path was needed.

There are moments when you can see the universe split. I distinctly remember the morning before her nephew's graduation party. It was pre-child. We did our tai-chi workout in the morning. We were so in sync it was beautiful. That night, we drove north to the party, and her mother told her that she was the reason that she and her father got divorced. (BTW, totally not the case, she was the child of an affair).

That night, part of her broke. Like, my parents were assholes, especially my father, but never did they put a blame of their relationship on me. It was devastating, on so many levels. I helped her (as best I could) to pick up the pieces.

Not too long afterword, her mother developed breast cancer (which spread everywhere). That inspired our decision to procreate. While her mother was dying, we decided to contribute to her legacy. Watching her mother interact with my spouse (and eventually my daughter) was eye-opening. The woman had a lot of issues and foisted them onto her offspring.

Life became more and more complicated after her mother passed. I don't think we were adequately prepared for the emotional toil. That was the moment the decline began.

We had decades of stress after that. There were a lack of resources to help. That's for sure. It just became harder and harder. Stress was a trigger for my wife's health. We did our best. I still love the shit out of that woman. But her illness eventually overcame her.

My birthday, October 28, is the last day we went out together.

December 23, two days before Chrismas, was when she was admitted to the hospital.

January 1, was our last anniversary together.

January 16, which was MLK day that year, was her last day on Earth.

February 1, was the first birthday of hers I celebrated without her.

I'm a wreck from at least my birthday through valentine's day. 5 months a year I remember the greatest love of my life.

It's a small price to pay. From my understanding, most people don't get that. I've been truly blessed.

How young were you when parents made relationships weird? I distinctly remember in 3rd grade being teased by my father for having a girlfriend, when honestly she was just a person I liked to hang-out with. There's no romance in grade school. WTF is the matter with you old man?!?

Instead of being taught to value connections, I was taught to be embarrassed by them. That's really fucked up in retrospect.

Love boldly and deeply. You may wind up with several broken hearts, but you will be better for it. Love isn't sex, love isn't commitment. Love is simply Love. Embrace it and enjoy it. It's for you, and if you're lucky, you are love for someone else.

I lost another dear friend last night. We called him Little Brother. He wasn't biologically related to most of the childhood gang, though he was related to his actual older brother (Duh, I mean, c'mon stream of consciousness, you don't have to explain everything).

As parents often do, they often tasked his actual older brother to let him tag along. We weren't good kids. I mean, we weren't terrible, but we started drinking and experimenting with drugs young, relatively, really young. In hindsight, there was an unreasonable amount of adults in my small town that used to party with us kids. We had a ready supply of all the candies we wanted. It's really kind of fucked up when looked upon in reflection. At the time, it was perfectly normal, since everybody in the small town experienced it.

He was successful. He was a great salesman and got good bonuses every year. Every six months or so, he'd go on a bender and would call from a police station, requesting some clothes (I don't know how he wound up naked and never asked). His boss just gave him a couple days off to recover and then let him go back to making money. He even told me once, that watching my wife and I get our shit together and move out of the town, gave him the inspiration to succeed. I mean, I was honored. I'm not usually known for being a good influence.

I remember a quote from high school (or maybe younger), they claim it was an African saying: "When an old man dies, a library burns down."

That could be why I'm writing this. Just sharing a story with the world that the alien anthropologists will find in 10,000 years.

I remember when we were like 13 or so (which would make little brother about 10 or so). We found an old abandoned pump station in the woods and turned it into a fort. A little concrete bunker, about 12x12. The overhead slab was still mostly intact so we were fairly protected by the elements. There were about four of us one night, plus Little Brother, assigned to us by his parents. We had some rum and coke and were just hanging out in our little fort. Little brother kept sneaking slugs of our drinks (I mean we tried to be responsible-ish and didn't actually give a youngin' his own rum and coke). He wound up REALLY drunk. Like, being honest, it was bad and gives me a little guilt about the path he took.

The story from his actual brother, is they were trying to be nonchalant, and just quietly get upstairs to their rooms. However, little brother was not functioning properly. He made it 3/4 up the stairs and then slid back down. There was really no choice except for older brother to fess up and tell his parents that we were drinking.

Strangely, there were only minor repercussions. (Maybe not so strangely, since we used to steal buds from their "garden" way back before weed was even close to legal.)

I know everyone makes their own decisions. Though I also know that people can influence each other. I certainly didn't kill him, but I don't feel guilt free of his life choices.

Anyway, God Bless Little Brother. I'll see you on the other side with all the others I love.

Words

Would usually rattle in my mind

Or at least get stopped in a dry mouth

Never to be spit upon a page

But here

In this world

I've learned to speak

And strangers listen

To the babblings of a madman

Get off my lawn!

But that's not really the case.

I hate lawns and grass and the fable of suburbanism.

Rip it all out and let things grow.

It's a better way to be interesting than dancing on TikTok.

And by the way, Fuck your HOA too.

My bitch is stronger than that.

Like the force in Vader (or Anakin, whatever you prefer).

Having to find your way to another state with a Road Atlas,

And no cell phone. And pay phones were a lifeline.

You call your friend from deep Philadelphia.

And are advised to put your foot against the door.

Just in case.

Everything was an adventure and unpredictable.

A thousand things could go wrong.

And there you were, in a shitty car, on a Canadian highway

(remember when we could just drive to Canada?)

Truckers roll by at a thousand miles an hour.

While snow comes down as your wipers leave streaks.

Even death wouldn't help.

It'd be days (or weeks or months) before someone knew

The landline would ring at 3 a.m.

At that hour, my mother always asked. . .

Who died?

We lost something

With all of the information in our pocket

I'm not begrudging access to knowledge

But the unknown is where we seek

The internet doesn't cover everything

There are worlds that we don't know.

Take a moment to disconnect

Just walk around the block

And absorb all that you see

Don't post it for likes

Don't share it for popularity

Look around and enjoy the plane we are given

Just for the sake of living on this plane

I wish you all

Some unpredictability

When you have a partner and share a bed, so much can ruin your sleep. Someone hogs the blankets. Someone hogs the bed. Cold toes, snores, restlessness, all exist in the small world of a queen mattress. Don't even think about when one of you has a cold. I truly understand the new trend of partners having their own bedrooms.

On rare occasions, you get the bed to yourself (or a bed if only one of you is traveling). You get to be a bed hog, blanket hog, pillow hog, all at the same time. Spread out like you're staked in the dessert for horse theft. All the blankets wrapped around you like you're going to be a spider's dinner. Three pillows in use for your head, arms, and knees. You pick the hotel in part to how comfortable the bed feels. I mean, that's the main purpose of a hotel (at least to a faithful married person, besides affairs are dirty and call for seedy motels off a secondary highway).

Holy shit when that partnership ends though. No starfish sleep at that time. Where you once met in the middle for cuddles now feels like an encroachment across a line of barbed wire. It's not your side of the bed. It's simply not. It was your partner's side and you are a trespasser.

It takes a long time for it to be your bed again.

Madmen and maniacs

Share mirth and smiles

Laughing at insights that make messiahs misunderstood

Songs surround frailties and failures

Allowing heavenly choirs to

Harmonize the dissonance found with Fourier's transform

No need to obey or command the road

Made for dancing directions

Square dance salsa pop ballet

Answers abound with questions unasked

Universal knowledge embraces intention

Like first kisses in midsummer

Bioluminescence flames the moth

Illuminating the path

To burn the way home

This is not an essay on the history of the Stoic philosophy or a judgment on any of its ideals. There are thousands and thousands of books and scrolls and web pages and podcasts which cover the specifics. This is simply my thoughts on how an enduring moral philosophy is applicable today. I know Prose has done away with timestamps, but for context, this is written by a middle-aged, white American, in a southern state during the second Trump/Biden presidential race.

America, has developed some recent social problems in the past decade or so. There is a great distrust in the media. Traditional media, such as network news and newspapers, have become labeled as enemies of the truth and enemies of the people. Nothing seems to exist in a politically neutral sphere anymore. Education is being accused of “brainwashing” children to indoctrinate them into whichever philosophy is antithetical to the person telling the story. Modern media, social or simply web pages, allow people to find stories they wish to hear, regardless of their accuracy. People search by conclusion (the Earth is flat) rather than by question (is the Earth flat) and limit their perspective to what they wish the answer to be.

Science and medicine have fallen into similar disfavor. Doctors are no longer treated as experts who have spent a considerable amount of time learning their craft. Pharmaceutical companies are perceived as a necessary evil driven by profit rather than a motivation to help human kind. The rigors of the scientific method are scoffed at as people would rather “do their own research” rather than understand the concept of scientific facts. The resurgence of flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers are a tribute to a loss of rational thought. The ancient Greek philosophers contemplated a round Earth in somewhere around 300 BC and Eratosthenes determined the size of our sphere (at least a damn fine guess for the lack of much technology) a hundred years later.

All of the above problems have a history which is not going to be discussed here. Do your own research.

The moral philosophy of the Stoics have strong foundational tenets which, while not solving the base problems mentioned above, would certainly help an individual navigate through a complicated world.

One tenet is the responsibility people have to each other. Stoics found humanity joined to each other in two important ways. First, we are all part of the divine, and share that quality with each other. No man, from Emperor to slave, is disconnected from any other person. Second, we all have an obligation to make society work. For mankind to live its best life, there needs to exist a certain level of trust and cooperation between everyone. Roads could not connect distant cities without a higher level plan rather than what could be accomplished by a single individual. The modern Stoic would embrace these beliefs to deal with the often volatile politics of today. There is no judgment in one have a differing political view because there are many paths to the same outcome. They would ignore the divisiveness and dismiss any activity detrimental to an individual or society. Violent rhetoric would be considered abhorrent and treated as not in line with Stoic virtues and morality.

Stoics also believed in rational thought above else. They recognized that intense feelings could cloud the judgment and lead to one behaving in an irrational manner. They valued accepting that nature is rational and also realizing that only the behavior of oneself could be controlled. There is little judgment in good or evil, as everything happens for a rational reason. In a tumultuous political and social climate, individuals would do well to concentrate on their own behavior and only work on what they can change.

As stated, one can only change oneself. Stoicism places an obligation on an individual to improve oneself. A benefit of such an obligation is that as individuals approve, so will society. An individual is meant to be virtuous and has a duty to improve in that direction. Rational thought and the suppression of too strong of any emotion will allow one to learn wisdom, insight, self-control, and justice.

The Stoic tenets would serve an individual well in any time period, but especially in the passionate, narrow view which currently seems to permeate our modern society.