Shadows are obstacles created by light. When light is extinguished, its companion shadows die with it. In the absence of light and shadows, darkness fills space with empty obscurity. Empty obscurity asserts it strength by simply existing; a dark, vacant space with the power to consume time in the same way a black dwarf star consumes light.
+++
I have watery eyes, a runny nose, a growling stomach, and a growing sense that these conditions may be permanent. They are not intolerable—more like perpetually annoying, after being present so long—but are sufficiently irritating to put me and keep me in a bad mood. While once I would have complained loudly about willfully stupid people, these afflictions are causing me to consider excruciatingly painful ways of ridding the planet of them. I could get used to perennially low levels of minor aches, if they were the price of revenge justice.
+++
In my opinion, Trump and his minions are engaged in a campaign of manipulative psychological torment. Their crusade, I believe, is based on reliable principles involving torture, terror, and an overwhelming volume of non-stop chaos. The checks and balances we once believed would protect our so-called democratic society from a zealous, autocratic ruler have proven useless. Only a near-universal rage, supported by the near-universal actions of an intolerant public (all willing to risk prison and death), has a chance of overcoming the attack on democracy. The realization of the seriousness of the matter, though, will come too late for even the strongest replies to do any lasting good.
+++
When the expanding universe reaches its own limits, it will instantly implode with the same force, at the same speed, and within the same timeframe that the Big Bang took place. That prediction is somewhat different from the Big Crunch theory, which seems to suppose the universe will collapse somewhat slowly. There will be no warning, nor will there be any evidence of either the Big Bang or the Big Crunch. In the final tiny fraction of a second, the universe will become an enormous fireball with a near-infinite temperature. Then, suddenly, at the absolute end, time and space will cease to exist. The question remains, though: what will replace time and space?
+++
It is entirely possible that, if there is a being who many call God, the being is so small as to be barely visible through the most powerful electron microscope. Nothing can be smaller than God; if a person believed anything could be smaller than God, that person’s burning flesh would light the sky from the most distant galaxy to the nearest sunrise. On a clear night, one can see the tiny remaining sparks of the last person whose conflagration lit the universe. Stars, we call them. They are not the impossibly distant hot gaseous masses the astronomers would have us believe, though. They are the dying embers of the last person to question God’s infinitely small size. Alternatively, maybe God is a single piece of pink granite, a remnant from a quarry that served as the source of a public building’s foundation. Captured within that hard stone could be a being whose powers exceed all other powers, combined, in the known universe…except the power to escape the crystals that keep God inside that stone. Or, God may be a figment of a collection of hopeful, gullible imaginations, too afraid of the unknown to let it remain an inexplicable mystery. I have to admit, too, that God may be an old white bearded man who possess extraordinary magical powers. Or a blonde woman with the tail of a fish and the power to control everything that merits her control. Or a black woman who wears colorful scarves and beads and sings new-age gospel music to wake the birds each morning. The other possibilities are too preposterous to consider.
+++
He spied a weed in the middle of an acres of roses, so he mowed the entire field down to bare soil and soaked the ground with gasoline.
