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Just flipped back and read my last journal entry. All those memories. All that time passed.
Now here I am again, awake at 3 in the morning, sitting with my mortality and a cup of hot cocoa. We all take turns at the wall; we all have dark nights of the soul. Soon, too soon, all my atoms will be recycled into cosmic potting soil and that’ll be the end of me. Or, soon, still too soon, my soul, my essence, my Me, will continue on to the grand, mysterious Whatever Comes Next. Is there a heaven? What form will it take? Is reincarnation the way it works? If so, I’ll be like Albert Brooks in Defending Your Life, trying to prove myself fearless enough to continue onward rather than being shipped back to remedial earth. Or will heaven be scriptural, and if so, which scriptures apply? Will heaven be purely metaphysical, consciousness without form, and if so, what the heck does that even mean? Or will heaven simply be another place? Just as we go from the womb to the world, will we go from the world to some wider place? I could keep spelunking on mortality until these typewriter keys are hammered flat. Instead, I’ve decided to do something immortal here and now: I’m going to tell my life story for my son. Not the whole story. I’ll try to leave out the boring parts. I just want to leave enough information for my son to know me and remember me after I’ve traveled on. I want to leave him a typewritten time machine through which he can meet his father as a child, as a teen, as a young man. I can secure that small immortality for him and for myself, here and now. As for the Big Forever, I’ll just have to wait and see. Comments 
Media Jean: Have you seen Defending Your Life? It’s hilarious! 
Chip: I like “The Pavilion of Past Lives.”
Media Jean: You know, your dad overlooked one kind of possible heaven: man-made heaven!
Chip: You mean bioengineering?
Media Jean: Bioengineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cloning, resetting biological clocks. There’s a lot happening on the frontiers of mortality.
Chip: I don’t think any of that will be ready in time for my dad.
Media Jean: Actually, it probably won’t be ready in time for us, either.
Chip: Yeah. If it was ready, right now, would you use it?
Media Jean: Heck yeah! Wouldn’t you?
Chip: Definitely! But I don’t think my dad would. He’d probably say it was unnatural.
Media Jean: You know, technology usually leaps ahead faster than we think.
Chip: Yeah! Maybe a longevity treatment will be ready in time for my dad!
Media Jean: Exactly! We just need to make sure he lives long enough to take advantage of it.
Chip: How are we going to do that?
Media Jean: First, he goes on a low calorie diet! I read that reducing your caloric intake by 30% can increase your lifespan by 30%.
Chip: Really?
Media Jean: In lab rats, anyway. But I’m betting the science holds up for humans.
Chip: I don’t know. My dad loves food.
Media Jean: He’ll need to start exercising, too.
Chip: He hates exercise, unless you mean hiking?
Media Jean: Hiking, jogging, walking, aerobics, pilates, weight lifting—all of it. He needs to hit the gym!
Chip: He doesn’t belong to a gym.
Media Jean: We’ll sign him up online. We have to extend your dad’s lifespan a little until science can extend it a lot.
Chip: You’re right! I’ll go through our kitchen and toss all the high fat stuff.
Media Jean: Great! I’ll come over and help. I bet we can boost your dad’s lifespan to 100, maybe 110!
Chip: Which should give technology enough time to develop a more permanent solution!
Media Jean: Right! Immortality, here we come! 
Comic strip from the series "Johnny Green's Avatar"
(Kid, Inc. Volume 2: The Batcave of Childhood) Have a thought for Bob? Write to us at [email protected]
Darndest thing happened last night.
Chip said he wanted to read me a bedtime story. He looked so sincere, what could I say? So last night, he was the father and I was the son. He watched as I flossed and brushed, and waited while I settled under the blankets, finding my spot. He sat on the edge of the bed, took out a couple sheets of printer paper, announced, When Death Comes, by Mary Oliver, and started to read in his small voice: When death comes... I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.* Then he made me close my eyes and listen as he read it again. Next thing I knew, dawn was on the curtains. I had slept the night through. I woke rested and calm and at peace. How did that happen? After all my sleepless nights, all my metaphysical strike outs, one little poem read by my son changes everything. Go figure. Maybe you need more than prayer and philosophy when facing Death. Those are the basics, good in most situations. But sometimes prayers bounce back. Sometimes philosophy rings hollow. Sometimes you need something else. Maybe a joke, or a battle cry, music or a poem. Some other kind of reminder spoken in someone else’s voice. A whisper not your own. A whisper to live, live, live, because when you lease all the rooms of your mind to Life, there’s no vacancy for Death. When you wrap both your arms around the waist of Living, Dying can’t get close to your heart. Here’s to you, Life. * From When Death Comes, by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press). Comments
Media Jean: Wow, he got a lot more out of that poem than I did.
Chip: Yeah. I’m not even sure what it’s about. I just found it online and it sounded kinda comforting.
Media Jean: You know he’s gonna ask you about it.
Chip: Yeah. He’ll want to know what I think the poem means.
Media Jean: Well, what do you think it means?
Chip: I’m not sure. I like “cottage of darkness.” That doesn’t sound scary at all.
Media Jean: I think it means don’t capitalize Death.
Chip: Ha ha! Lower case death. That makes me think of the Grim Reaper wearing short pants.
Media Jean: It’s like Voldemort in Harry Potter. Wizards calling him “You Know Who” and “He Who Must Not Be Named.” Give me a break! That just made everyone more afraid of him. Harry and Dumbledore had the right idea.
Chip: My dad likes Harry Potter.
Media Jean: Tell him to stand up to death the way Harry stood up to ol’ Snake Face. Stand up for life and love and friendship and truth and all that jazz.
Chip: All that jazz. That’s funny.
Media Jean: Maybe we should get him one of those Harry Potter wand remotes, so every time he watches TV he’ll feel like a wizard.
Chip: Ha ha! That’s a great idea! 
Comic strip from the series "Bedtime Stories"
(Kid, Inc. Volume 1: Look Out, Tomorrow, Here We Come!) Have a thought for Bob? Write to us at [email protected]
Alice has been tweeting a “weekly mantra,” thoughts to keep in the grown-up mind as she spends her day teaching the child mind.
Turns out, the kids have been making posters out of her mantras. Knowing I’ll never go online, she prints them out and sends them to me as postcards, via good ol’ snail mail. They’re beautiful. Great strong words to help me through the day. But I have to say, I’m surprised. Thoreau and Emerson, Shakespeare and Dickinson. They seem (I hate to say it) too old to be of any real interest to the TikTok generation. And I can’t help but wonder what quotes the kids themselves would choose for their daily mantras. Comments
Media Jean: If by “old” he means “boring,” he’s right.
Chip: I kind of like them.
Media Jean: Let’s take his advice and Google some mantras and quotes of our own.
Chip: I found a page called Teachers First with great quotes, like, “People in glass houses… better not take off their clothes.”
Media Jean: That’s hilarious! I like this one, “A penny saved is… not much.”
Chip: “Two’s company, three’s… the Musketeers.”
Media Jean: Ha ha! “He who laughs last… didn’t understand the joke.”
Chip: Teachers First is a great web site! Check out, Wise Advice from Kids. I like this one, “Never trust a dog to watch your food.”
Media Jean: Ha ha! “You can’t hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk.” I wonder if they’re talking about school or homework?
Chip: “Puppies still have bad breath even after eating a tic tac.”
Media Jean: See? These quotes are as good as anything ol’ Thoreau ever said.
Chip: You really think so?
Media Jean: Sure! Take that one about not trusting a dog to watch your food. That’s about understanding who someone is. Their true nature. That’s philosophy. That helps you make better decisions. Thoreau or Play-Dough couldn’t have said it any better.
Chip: I think that's Plato. But it is pretty good.
Media Jean: Let’s make a poster out of it and snail-mail it to your dad!
Have a thought for Bob? Write to us at [email protected]
Chip says a lot of poetry is written online these days. A lot of Twitter haiku. Twikiu, for goodness’s sake.
Last night, as I was tucking him in, he held out his cell phone and said, “Write a poem, dad.” Instead, I cracked open my new copy of Walden, turned to Chapter 2, and read: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…” Chip was asleep in seconds. Sigh. I’m sticking with my Underwood typewriter. It was good enough for Faulkner, Hemingway, Kerouac and the great E.B. White, it’s good enough for me. Most of the best words in human history were written manually. All those chisels and brushes and pens and typewriters. And you know what? A manual typewriter just feels better. When I tap a key, I feel that satisfying punch (CLACK!) of metal on paper. I like feeling the impact of each letter. Every now and then, I roll out a freshly typed page, turn it over, close my eyes, and run my fingers over those faint and sometimes spiky impressions. Bob’s Braille. Who needs a laptop, word processor or spell check? I got my Underwood, white out, and a dictionary. I’m all set. Comments
Media Jean: What’s white out?
Chip: The label says “Liquid Paper.” Dad uses it to paint over his typos. After it dries, he retypes. It’s sort of like Undo for his generation.
Media Jean: That’s even more work than erasing! Why not just use a pencil? Your dad cracks me up! But the Braille thing sounds pretty cool.
Chip: Yeah, it does feel like Braille. But I like binary better. It’s like seeing the DNA of your thoughts. Try it!
Media Jean: I found a binary-to-text converter online. Here’s “Walden”: 010101110110000101101100011001000110010101101110
Chip: I should make a T-shirt of that for my dad. 
Johnny: Would you time-wasters get back to work?!
Media Jean: Hey, Johnny: 01100111 01101111 00100000 01110011 01101111 01100001 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101000 01100101 01100001 01100100
Johnny: Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just get back to work! 
HComic strip from the series "Bob's Blog"
(Kid, Inc. Volume 1: Look Out, Tomorrow, Here We Come!) ave a thought for Bob? Write to us at [email protected]
All these years, I’ve pounded out my thoughts on a trusty Underwood Champion Portable Typewriter. My favorite authors wrote by hand or on typewriters.
Can you see Harper Lee writing To Kill A Mockingbird on an iPad? Or Emily Dickinson tweeting Hope is the thing with feathers on a mobile phone? Actually, Emily might have done that. What do I know? Chip’ll show me tweets and messages and posts from Media Jean, and some of her one-liners are pretty good. Just the other day she tweeted: “I’m flying through the air and see everything out of the corner of my eye.” If she had been writing about her unfettered imagination rather than her wireless connection, that’d be flat out poetry. Maybe it is anyway. Repeat after me: What do I know, what do I know, what do I know...? Comments
Media Jean: Your dad’s right. If Emily were writing today, she’d love social media! She could be anonymous and public at the same time. If you ask me, she’s the patron saint of social media poetry. Go, Emily!
Chip: I didn’t know who she was until dad lost his copy of Walden. He likes to read me Thoreau at bedtime. Now he reads Emily. I like her stuff better.
Media Jean: Lost? Didn’t you hide his copy of Walden?
Chip: Yeah. I thought I could get him to read an e-book. I even downloaded Walden to my phone. But he said that would be saccharine.
Media Jean: I think you mean sacrilegious. Your dad’s a riot!
Chip: I love him too.
Johnny: Would you two slackers get back to work?! We’re supposed to be designing software! This is why every responsible corporation in America needs to block social media access for all employees!
Media Jean: Speaking of which, what’re you doing reading a blog on company time?
Chip: Shocking behavior for our CFO.
Media Jean: Unless CFO stands for Chief Facebook Officer. Johnny Green, the new Facebook face for Kid, Inc.
Johnny: One of these days I’m going to take over this company and fire you idiots.
Media Jean: Until then, get back to work, you slacker!
Have a thought for Bob? Write to us at [email protected]
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AuthorHey, I'm Bob, and I hate technology. So why am I blogging? Because I love my son. He upgraded my typewriter to wirelessly post every keystroke online. It makes him happy, so here I am. Archives
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