The human soul, according to certain anonymous and potentially reliable sources, is tiny—smaller than the smallest piece of glitter. That fact, coupled with the essentially infinite size of the universe, explains how it is that billions upon billions of people who have died since the emergence of humankind have not clogged “heaven.” Heaven is exactly the same size as the universe, you see, and offers plenty of room for all those miniscule pieces of glitter. Each human soul is afforded what we Earthlings would call a one thousand cubic acre plot to serve as our soul’s eternal resting place, after our bodies have evolved into the building blocks of forevermore. Those plots of space-time are more than adequate to provide eternity for the semi-souls of our pets, which explains how we expect to frolic with our long-dead dogs and cats after our own time has come. The interactions between post-mortem human souls is not as easy to explain, though, inasmuch as each of them (according to those anonymous and potentially reliable sources) is restricted to movement within the thousand-acres cubes. This ongoing, unanswered question is the subject of extensive research; to date, though, the answer remains an unsolved mystery.
+++
Speaking of heaven and such, I saw something yesterday I thought was quite a generous offering to a would-be dictator:
Let us pray for him: Psalm 108: 8-9
Not being familiar with that particular Psalm (and the others), I looked it up:
8. Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
9. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
+++
The hottest star in the universe is said to be WR 102, with an estimated surface temperature of 377,540°F. The star is located approximately 8,480 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Astronomers and astrophysicists say it is nearly 300,000 times brighter than the sun. A distinct relationship must exist between temperature, brightness, and distance; what that association is, though, confounds those of us untrained in such celestial matters.
+++
Once again, I went to bed early and slept only fitfully for much of the night. My gut noisily accompanied its mild discomfort and urged me to be ready, just in case I might be overcome by nausea. So far, so good. But when I got up, sometime after 6, I looked in the mirror to see a bloody nose. Apparently, sometime during the night, I got into a bar fight. And lost. I have never been much of a fighter. My only involvement in a true fight, that I remember, took place while I was in high school after a night of drunken revelry when my small group of friends stopped at a gas station. I found offensive something my friend, Mark, said to me, so I took a swing at him. He swung back…much harder. I still have a nearly-invisible scar, more than 50 years later, beneath my lower lip. I discarded the shirt I had been wearing because it was awash in blood from my wound. I do not think Mark and I repaired our friendship. I learned just a few years ago that he died several years later, after getting a Ph.D. in oceanography (I think) and forming a moderately successful pharmaceutical company. What my fight with Mark and Mark’s subsequent career and death have to do with my fitful sleep last night is beyond me. But there you go. That’s how the mind scurries down rabbit holes sometimes.
+++
I will not attend church this morning. The bloody nose and potential nausea argue against it. And I might be able to get the sleep this morning that I failed to get last night. Mi novia, though, will trot off to the sanctuary to listen to an insight service. It’s conceivable I might watch and listen online, but I’m making no promises to myself in that regard.
