"Night is when the curtains are pulled back, and we may see the setting of our grand play...Look! The whole universe is watching us! The stars are the audience looking on, their flickering the applause."

This was painted by a friend of mine.  

Eternity touched the ground
and filled everything I saw

The sky was wide and dark
Stars spoke to us of far away lands

Under the treetops
Crickets cried out from the deep of creation

A fog hovered over the field
the world is drenched with feeling

The moon was clear and bright
and hung alone above the house

I want to be in solitude,
to appreciate this with you

It is amazing that I am alive

but I'll forget this night
as I drown in the sleep of my bed

The two men were meeting for coffee to discuss work, marketing, finances, etc.
"Do you have those sales reports from last month?" Frank asked.  He was all business.
Garber's left leg was going crazy bouncing, and he was going crazy too.  He couldn't contain himself.  Finally he burst out laughing.  
"What exactly, pray tell, is so funny?" Frank said, a bit agitated, as the laughter died away.   
"It's just . . we're two guys  . . meeting here.  Talking about business," Garber said as though Frank would pick up on the thought immediately.  "You know," he emphasized. The humor imbued in the situation was the most obvious thing in the world to him.
Frank looked straight ahead in exasperation while clearly grasping no reason at all to laugh.
"THIS IS HILARIOUS!" Garber shouted, causing tables around them to glance in their direction.  Frank's gaze remained constant and unaffected.
"There is absolutely nothing funny about us meeting here," Frank said frankly, now quite perturbed.
"Well it's just, it's just," Garber tried to gather his words, his mind aswirl with excitement. "Ok, just think about it like you're a guy who's outside the window.  Just a guy standing there, looking in.  And we're in here, two business guys—serious business guys, very serious—and we are dressed up all funny in our shoes and ties, and we talka talka talka.  And just think, we never expected to be alive and meeting here.  Wow.  And now we're here, and we're pretending to be all serious about it, like we always thought we'd end up like this, even though we didn't." 
A silence passed.
"Haha!" Garber ejected. "Am I right?  It's absolutely ridiculous."
"Yes," Frank said acerbically.  "It is."
"Or think of it like this," Garber began with his new explanation. "We're two scientists, and so obviously we think we're all animals.  And we go to an animated movie with our kids, one with talking animals in it.  And we think it's really silly, you know, because the animals in the movie are talking."  Garber's voice amplified with the excitement of the point.  "But we're animals, Frank, we're animals! And just look at us talking! Talka talka talka!"  Garber burst into another hearty laugh. 
"Garber," Frank started slowly.  "I don't like you.  Can we please just do our work?"
"You don't, you don't . . . find existence funny?"  Garber asked in a conciliatory tone, winded from all his laughing.
"No," said Frank.
It was in that moment Garber realized his friend was a curmudgeon.  After all, his purely innocuous laughter had put him in such high dudgeon, and that during a perfectly cordial luncheon.  If their friendship wasn't going to be thrown into a dungeon, he thought he had better say something. 
"So what now, do you think me a bumpkin?"
Garber then took a sip of his coffee, the flavor of which was spiced pumpkin.
"I am going to go get a sandwich.  When I return, you'll have the monthly report, and will be sober and serious."
"But don't you get it," Garber said in a tone that stressed that this point was the bottom line, "There are no goofy villains.  You'll never find one.  Or at least, one who's goofy on purpose.  And that's because they're sick freaks who don't understand anything about life or children.  They miss completely how funny and fun it is to be alive."  That was Garber's final point.  Then he added a post-script. "I mean, to just think that we used to be children.  That our belly buttons are evidence that there's another creature somewhere out there that spawned us!  We're all spawns, Frank, we're all spawns."
Garber laughed and laughed about the spawns line.  Frank was still gripping the back of his chair from when he almost got up to get a sandwich.  He was now wondering if he should contact the authorities.
"A totally serious person would be the funniest thing there is," Garber said, shrugging his shoulders. "That's all I'm saying, Frank." 
Our scene zooms out with Frank staring long and hard at Garber after this line had been delivered.

There is a terrifying aspect of irremovability to the life that you live.  It is impossible to live in a way that is not permanent; your life stains reality.  To live is to define what it means to be permanent; you can beg and scratch and kick and scream, but the past will never be other than it is and will be.  To forget is not to erase, it is merely to turn away.  The picture of your life is slowly being unfolded, and once it has been lived, it will look as it does until eternity has passed.

Irremovability, however, is not the only culprit that lends a terror to life. To live is to confess.  Together these two ghosts haunt the lonely thinker in his barren room in the depths of the night.

When you have a thought, there is a sense in which you believe that thought is worth having, unless you try to direct your attention away from it.  To have a short life means to have a limited thought life; therefore, whatever we spend time thinking about we are letting take up pages of the story of our thoughts.  To think is, in part, to commit yourself to the subject of your thought.

To say something is a next step of commitment; it is to put your thoughts into the public world.  Thus, whenever you talk you are indicating what has a weight to you, what kinds of things you think are worth saying.  Every person you talk to, underneath everything, understands this; there is a belief in them that what you are saying is in some way important to you, and makes you who you are, or else you would not have said it.

But what really means something to you is what you act on.  If a thought is the blueprint of an airplane, and saying something is to build the airplane, then an action is to actually fly the plane; it is saying, in the deepest sense possible, this is something I really think is worthwhile.  I am committing my life to it, pouring what time I have into doing this thing. 

To act is for your life to be airborne; where will you go?

Thus, the life you live is a confession of what you think is worthwhile, perhaps even to yourself.  Your life reveals your God or gods.  This is why it is scary for another person to know your life; they hear your confession.  Otherwise it is only for our wide eyes to think about on our deathbeds, feeling the quiet anxiety of a wasted life. 

For the three elements of thought, speech, and action to be in harmony is what it means to live an honest life.  And to live an honest life is of course a good thing.  But I think it's a part of being human for our spirits to ache to not just live an honest life, but to live a true one, one where we are not only consistent and genuine in what we pour our life into, but one in which we pour it into what is actually the right and good way to live, the way life ought to be done.  I think to feel that desire is to really come alive.  That there's a true and beautiful way for life to be done, and to think we might miss that way, should thud to the floor of every young person's heart, and bring at least one true moment of sadness in life, even if one never knows what it is to be sad again.

But to think that life doesn't matter at all is a lie; your life reveals your gods.

There's a girl at my work named Liz who I like a lot, but not really, but I do like her.  And I have heard it's good to be playful with girls you like, which to me means to be full of wordplay.

So yesterday I asked her, "Liz, do you like deer?"

"What are you talking about . . you mean the animal?"  I said yes.  "Oh yeah, I love deer," she said.  "They are like really big dogs."

"Wow, you are basically obsessed with deer," I concluded.  "You can't stop talking about them.  Everyone!" I announced. "Liz is completely obsessed with deer!  Yup . .  Everyone agrees that you are obsessed with deer.  In fact, that is now your new nickname."

"What?"

"Deer.  What a great nickname.  Hello deer, how are you doing?"   

And so then I got to call her deer all day long.  One time she helped me and I said, "Thank you, deer" so she said, "You just wanted to call me that!" but I said, "No, I just wanted to show my appreciation for you . . . (pause) . . . doing that." 

Then later I told her I was obsessed with bees, and she said she loved bees.  I told her I basically couldn't stop talking about bees.  "Hey! My new nickname should be honey!"  

So yes, everything is going according to plan.