About KFJ
About KFJ in relation to DaddyHogwash.com
A friend of mine told me that your whole life can be defined (in self-awareness terms) by considering three to four major life-shaping events. A major memory from before you were eight years old, twelve years old and twenty years old. I don’t have any empirical evidence to support this, but upon thinking on it for a bit, it made sense to me.
One event from my life happened in second grade when a young girl with disabilities was struck in the head during a game of dodge ball. It broke her very thick glasses and she cried and sobbed, stumbling out of the gym and in to the hallway. I have never been sure if that ball was thrown by me or by another boy standing beside me, but I keenly remember watching the path of the ball all the way until impact with her head. I imagine that under normal circumstances, this event would have cycled out of my mind, but the facts of life had other plans. She died that evening.
I don’t remember the exact details of how I found out she died. If my memory is correct, the next day, someone walked in to the classroom to let us know. I believe they said her brain hemorrhaged, and I also seem to remember that they said the blow to her head during our game of dodge ball was just a coincidence. That was the last I had ever heard of it. I don’t think my parents were told. There were no counselors at school. We were certainly never given any direction on how to deal with the fact that this friend of ours was with us one day and a ghost the next.
That evening, in bed, started a 20+ year bout of nightly anxiety attacks. The first anxiety attack played out in my mind as I imagined this little girl (her name may have been Amy, or Annie) lying in her red velvet-padded coffin, underground, trying to get out, unable to breathe. Then I realized that I would one day be in a similar situation; however, I had not fully worked out the idea that I would in fact be dead and not able to breathe whether I was in a coffin or not. To this day, even though I seemingly have defeated my anxiety over my mortality, I will not lay in bed on my back, with the fingers of my hands grasping each other across my chest, for “I will have all of eternity to lie this way, no need to start now.”
This condition hit a new high (or low) for me after I developed a blood clot behind my knee after routine knee surgery at the age of 26. It was deep vein thrombosis, and while I never actually had the near-death experience, it was close enough for me. The emergency room doctor answered my questions by saying, “if it spreads to your lungs, you may feel an intense pain in your chest and that could very likely be the end. If it doesn’t, you will be playing catch with your family in no time.” I never had a harder time trying to go to sleep in the hospital than that night. (Incidentally, after I had finally fallen asleep, the nurses woke me up to give me sleep medicine.)
At some point, a little over a year ago, the anxiety vanished. It still creeps up here and there, but it is more about how I hate the idea of not living and loving with my family than it is a fear of death.
I am not a religious person. I dabbled in Christianity as a teen, but my brain just doesn’t appear to be wired that way. (This wiring has as much to do with environment and experience than it does nature, I am sure). If I must place myself in a category, agnosticism fits. In the scheme of things, I just don’t know for sure. I am relatively sure that if there is a God, he/it is nothing like the major religious texts of our world proclaim that he/it is. I am not an atheist because it appears to be just as faulty to claim that God doesn’t exists as it is to claim that he (for historical simplicity’s sake) does exist. There is no proof in either case. (However, as Richard Dawkins would proudly say, “I can’t prove the non-existence of unicorns and fairies either, but I can be certain that they are not real.”)
All of this brings me to the relevant point, which is that out of true boredom and an inability to dedicate myself to little of anything outside the health and well-being of my family, I like to read, write, and philosophize. It turns out, as Montaigne said, “To philosophize is to learn how to die.” How about ‘dem apples? I know how to live pretty well (although plenty of others would argue). It turns out that it helps to get along with others (sometimes tricky) and to work in order to support yourself and those who depend on you. I also continue to find ways to have a good time, trying hard not to be a fuddy-duddy. I also have the basics down as it is pretty easy for me to breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. I also am no stranger to eating well and making waste. Food, drink, and shelter. If you have those things, you are one lucky S.O.B.!
So, there it is. To philosophize is to learn how to die, and I seem to have death on my mind and at the edge of my lips quite a bit. To not have death on your mind as a mortal being seems to be a defense mechanism, allowing you to deny your mind access, like a network firewall, to your own innate knowledge of your mortality.
DaddyHogwash.com is an exploration in to this philosophy. Some of it quite banal (contrary to the subtitle of the site) and others very controversial. Much of it will even be irrelevant to the subject at hand, (at least at first glance) but all of it is part of my journey to help me to develop a personal philosophy of which I can eventually hand down to my children (Daddy) helping them on their own personal quest in life for meaning as they wade through infinite amounts of worthless, meaningless data (Hogwash).
Join in my (our) development and be sure to share links and thoughts, especially those of a critical nature. It’s the test of one’s philosophy that determines its validity.
