Got to keep climbing, despite the negative chant, the chorus of voices who always say you can’t (tip of the mitre to that rapper who wrote Potential back around 1991) I’d be Dr. Seuss, if I had the juice.  Less than six minutes remain to this scattered refrain, so let me, as they say, make the most of those now 300 seconds.

It focuses the brain, they say, being on the scaffold like this, though it distracts the brain too, the thought that it will all be over in, now, less than 260 seconds.

Thomas Jefferson, my main tragically hypocritical man, stole lines written by a man on the scaffold when he famously wrote that a favored few were not born booted and spurred to ride the rest of us.   He was famously wrong, of course, as he was born booted and sharp spurred, ask his terrified, bloody horse.

“This is how you want to go out?” asks, you, say.

“Absolutely not.  I want to go out with words of inspiration and gratitude for the many gifts of this wonderful life.  Sure you have a right to be sad, even bitter, but why waste time when you have less than 110 seconds before the end?  When you see that tsunami coming to wipe out the earth, right after you gasp ‘oh, shit!” it will not be anger, sadness or bitterness in your mouth.  Terror and wonder, terror and wonder, my friend.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” observed my father moments before he breathed his last.

“Nobody does,” I reassured him.  Then he did it like a champ.