Month: October 2013

How will they remember me?

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(Patricia van Casteren / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

So, as a lot of you know, I’m a diehard Cal football fan. (It’s awful. Don’t ask.) And so, like any Cal fan, I want to know more about my team that I support, and I fell in with the crew at California Golden Blogs. One of the features of CGB that really lets the zaniness show is what’s called the Daily Bear Dump (yes, Cal fans can be both clever and immature), and it’s sorta the daily links/random commentary post.

I hang out in there sometimes, although I’m gone an awful lot more than I’m present, and there’s a core of regulars. One of my favorites went by the moniker CalBandGreat, who seemed to have a warm sense of humor and was always friendly. He was also known for his great tailgates, which, sadly I had never made it to.

I never will now. He passed away last Thursday.

I just got looking at his LinkedIn account, and I see that he’s a fellow member of what I refer to in my sig on the site as the Lost Tribe of Mooch — that is the Cal fans who started school in 1996, the one single year Steve Mariucci was our coach. This makes it hit even harder, and I don’t know how to talk about it.

One of the thoughts swirling in my head about the whole thing, one of them is simply “how will I be remembered?” Let me say very clearly at this moment that I am not suicidal. I do not want to die. I am merely thinking about what would happen if I were to die, due to natural causes or being hit by a bus or struck by falling space debris or whatever.

And it haunts me deeply that I do not think I will be missed. Now some of this could be depression speaking. It’s not exactly a rational response to it all. All this struggle, all this fighting, and nothing to show for it. It does not help that I’m reticent by nature and prone to disappearing.

I don’t even know where I’m going with this. Just — a good guy is dead, and now I’ll never get the chance to meet him. Yet, he has his small piece of immortality — the gang at CGB remember him.

How will they remember me?

How will any of the communities I am in remember me?

Science. It’s amazing.

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From Expanding Earth, the latest from xkcd‘s What If? section:

After the initial jolt, one of the first effects you’d notice would be that your GPS would stop working. The satellites would stay in roughly the same orbits, but the delicate timing that the GPS system is based on would be completely ruined within hours. GPS timing is incredibly precise; of all the problems in engineering, it’s one of the only ones in which engineers have been forced to include both special and general relativity in their calculations. (emphasis added)

And I use it to find tupperware in the woods.

Science. It’s pretty amazing, and damn near magic.