My food ran out days ago and there’s no prospect of rescue up here at the top of the world. I try to put up my tent, but the arctic wind bludgeons and tears at the fabric. My compass is gone, my GPS is behaving strangely and the whiteout obliterates the stars. I no longer know which direction to walk in. The next time I fall, I stay there, slumped in the snow, ready to give in to sleep at last.

I drift, watching flurries of snow dart past my goggles. The snowstorm cancels out any differences in the landscape. When my eyes close it’s darker, but that’s the only difference, it seems, between being awake or asleep.

There is something tugging me. Something rough and insistent. I try to shrug it off but it gives me no rest. I open my eyes to a blur of dark movement. It…

Today we’ll go about our daily lives as if there is a tomorrow. Same as twenty three other people did. Twenty three people whose only crime was that they were living inside the age of insanity, where lives do not matter as much as rhetoric.

We like to say that tomorrow is not a guarantee, but for some, neither is today. This post is about the today they never got to have.

In Pittsburgh . . .

Irving Younger will grab an umbrella on his way out the door. He’ll leave a few minutes early so he can say how do to the regulars at his favorite coffee shop. He’ll share a funny story or two before making his way to Saturday service, where he’ll be the familiar face that greets Melvin Wax. These two early birds will boast about how they don’t feel a day over fifty, in spirit. Their…

People are inherently good.

We’re raised to believe this concept from the time we’re old enough to get bored during liturgy and choose sides on the playground. Most kids aren’t concerned with empirical validation when the freedoms they hold most dear are threatened; yanno, stuff like playtime and dessert.

Then there was me.

I questioned everything, no matter how convincing the adults were at selling the points. I wanted to believe people were generally good, but I had myriad reasons to be skeptical. Adding to my distrust of the status quo was the fact that I read, a lot. And I observed, everything.

So it was that I questioned the cross stitched tenets of a happy life, which mandated that you go to school, score a good job and get married. Societal conventions read like a manual, and I knew that spiritual complications navigated through so much more than a…