The House That Young Built
Well, I finally made my way out to Genesys* to see my dad. Actually, I had no intention of doing any such thing, but he called and requested some books and I could find neither hide nor hair of my mum; so, out I went. She was there in his room, as she has been every night this week, which is strange, because when he's healthy she does pretty much whatever she has to to avoid him. I dropped off the books, inscribed "Brooks Was Here" and "So Was Red" on his room's dry erase board, and was on my way. I hate hospitals. It's not that I'm afraid of them, nor is it that I find them depressing, I find them offensive.

(*For those of you not from around here... you poor bastards... Genesys is a local health care provider, a hybrid word of Genesee - Grand Blanc is in lovely Genesee County, Michigan - and system, Genesys.)

Obviously, I am glad we have hospitals and I marvel at the collective genius that has allowed Homo sapiens sapiens to conquer so many diseases. Child mortality is down, life expectancy is up, and we laugh in the face of explodin' appendices. Nevertheless, I cannot think of anything more horrible than dying in a hospital. Wearing a cheap paper robe? Tubes running into and out of the body? Surrounded by doctors who spend half their day worrying about lawyers and their predatory malpractice suits? Or worse yet, surrounded by your family and friends? For Bog's sake, I don't want them to see that! The last thing I want my family to see is my body, limp and all but lifeless, my ribs broken in order to pry them open. Better for their to be no body and bury a weighted coffin than for my mother or my wife or my daughters to see me like that.

People say that if Man was meant to fly, he would have been born with wings. That's rubbish, it is the nature of Man to challenge the unknown, to scale new heights, to follow the lead of bicycle builders from dayton, Ohio in the application of Bernoulli's Princlpe. Why climb Everest? "Because it's there," the words made all the more powerful because the man who uttered them died fulfilling them. But there are things Man was and was not meant to do. A man is meant to love one woman, or one man, whatever he desires, but to have one great love of his life. A man should live according to principles he is willing to die for, and if necessary, to kill for. A man should not die in a hospital, machines doing the work on this organs after the latter have failed. A man's children should not see him die. A man should die under the Sun, in the dirt, in a godforsaken country that is not his own. A man should die thinking of his wife, not looking at her.

"The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead."