Four years ago a designer that was doing marketing for the European Southern Observatory asked if they could use my picture (see left) for an ad in their trade journal. I agreed, but mostly because they were going to send me a bunch of large posters of pictures they had taken with their massive telescopes.

In another life, I think I would be an astronomer. I took an astronomy class in college to fulfill some of my math credits. I had taken a semester off from my university in Arkansas to "figure out what I was doing." What a silly thing to try to do. So I was attending the University of North Texas and this meant that our astronomy lab was just over the border into Oklahoma, a southern state with big skies and lacking the light pollution of North Texas. The math was difficult for me--I have a weird relationship with numbers that is not entirely logical. (Does anyone else make change from a dollar by subtracting things in terms of 10s? It gets more complicated than it should be.) But i loved looking through the telescope, past our terrifyingly thin atmosphere, through all the transparent space that separates stuff that hangs around in the universe to lay my eyes upon stars and planets and other things so completely distant. It made me feel tiny and insignificant. Politicians and drunken pop stars should regularly look through telescopes and remember their place.

I read this morning that astronomers and scientists have stumbled upon a cosmic nothingness, a void, a "billion light years of nothing" out in the outer space. As I get along in life and stop my writing or playing or walking to stop and stare out the window, into the sky, whereever....i think this is where my mind has gone. into the Big Empty.

I was having an interesting chat with a dude name Todd in Michigan on Monday night. Todd had fallen off a bull while bull riding and broken his neck 2 years ago and is now a quadraplegic. I am a very curious person and he indulged me in talking about his life and his injury and also the travel he is doing to get treatment. (He goes to Russia every 3 months for stem cell therapy because he can't get it here.) After a short while, he asked me "what do you think happens to you when you die?" (I didn't realize that this was a tamer version of "have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?") We talked a bit more about Aquinas and religious upbringing, but I'm sure he left the conversation unsatisfied: i would not acquiese that there is Heaven or Hell or that I'm going to either because I have or haven't accepted Jesus into my life. I did mention that I'm so narcissistic that I sometimes believe I've created everything in the world that I can sense in my own mind, including history, wars, art, music, etc. His friend, who was sitting semi-silent nearby, piped in that he wished I would stop creating wars and rape. (I'll work on that.) There was no conversion and I didn't leave my gig to follow them to Bible study, but I did say that they could pray for me, if they wanted, since they both agreed, right there, on the spot, that I was going to Hell.

Anyway......after reading that article this morning, I'd like to amend my statement about what I said I think happens to me after I die. (I had pleaded this cop out argument that I reserved the right not to know or guess what happens.) I think I'll go to the void. I think my bodily energy will leave the earth and fly through the ether at a billion light years per hour and it will fall into the void. Disappearing forever. Leaving no trace.