A guy named Frank used to own the house behind my house. Frank was a vibrant warm guy and seemed really open-minded. Unfortunately, he died a few months ago. He collected pianos and put a lot of energy into transforming the space behind his house into a wonderful garden. He and his tenants would sit in the garden and drink lemonade and chat away many afternoons. Frank's pianos and flowers were not products of greed or obsessiveness. He genuinely loved these things and he rescued them from their decay.


Frank's death saddened me particularly because his warmth and vigor seemed so sure. Almost immediately after he died, his garden began to wither and get overgrown with weeds. From my window, I watched all of Frank's work dissolve.


Tonight I was walking to the train station and I saw two dumpsters in front of Frank's house. Some stupid curiosity made me look. All of Frank's piano's were smashed and thrown into the dumpsters. I felt sick and weak, and I felt so alone. I felt an amplified feeling of what I feel a little bit of every day, which is that the world is brutal and thoughtless and that, through this thoughtless brutality, we smash the big chain of life and love into tiny, meaningless, useless pieces.


Frank is dead. I should have taken him up on his offer to come over and hang out with him and his tenants/friends. I really wanted to hear his story and, of course, I wanted to learn what he learned during his years. His pianos are in a dumpster now and his garden looks like the garden of a dead guy.


Anyway, who gives a shit what happens after we die? I don't know. I'll bet that if Frank thought that his pianos would have been smashed and put in a dumpster, he would have definitely wanted to sell them or give them away. But I'm pretty sure that he wasn't expecting to die at that moment.

If I get hit my a car and die on my way home tonight, nobody will care about all of the shit that I've collected during my life. All of my unfinished projects will be discarded. Actually, most of my finished projects will be discarded as well. My UNIX home directory will be deleted. My position in the world will be empty. My assets and liabilities will be assumed by my family, but they cannot carry on my thoughts, my relationships, my hopes, my struggles, my commitments.

When somebody dies, the love that they feel ceases to exist. I currently find it hard to imagine the people and things that I love existing without my love. The people will survive without me, but the physical stuff will probably go into a dumpster. My friends know how much I care about some of the physical stuff. The objects I care the most about are the wonderful things that I rescued from the trash. Part of my function on Earth is to defend the dignity of these things. My friends and family can demonstrate their loyalty to me after I die. I don't care what anybody says about me. I just don't want my treasures to go into a dumpster.