No fear. Cavalier. Renegade steer clear...

Howdy!

Sorry I've been gone awhile. I've been busy getting ready for the impending Rapture. It's tomorrow, you know? So if your ascension robe is still at the cleaners, you might want to swing by and grab it before they close tonight.

Harold Camping and his followers must be planning one heck of a party for tonight. I truly hope they enjoy it, because come Sunday morning I have a feeling they're going to be disappointed. Now, of course, the joke could be on the rest of us and the Rapture really does happen tomorrow. In which case, I hope one of my heathen friends will adopt our dogs. On second thought, they're the purest souls on the planet, so they should be coming with us. 

I don't want to mock anyone's faith. Faith is a wonderful and valuable thing. I'm just a little skeptical of someone who's predicted this once before. Apparently he got his math wrong last time. Camping swears tomorrow is the day and that it's in the Bible. Could I get a page number on that? 'Cause I'm not finding it in my version. In fact, all the versions I've seen say no one knows the day or the hour.

Camping and his followers have become the butt of countless jokes on the web and creative entrepreneurs are even trying to make a buck off of this.  No matter what you think about his prediction, there is some value here.

A learned Greek once told his followers:

Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.

Our individual worlds will all end at some point. Most of us aren't living like we're dying. You could even argue that most of us aren't really living like we're living.  Zombies make for wonderful fiction.  They're creepy, nasty, oozing, moaning reanimated critters. Maybe part of the scare factor is that deep down, we know on some level, we're all zombies. 

How often do you take a second to look around and marvel at the world around you? How often are you truly living in the moment, sucking the marrow out of life? How many times a day do you do something that scares you, challenges you?

Our own Raptures are coming -- tomorrow or sometime in the next 100 years. When mine does, I want to be able to tell God I danced in fountains, made love under the stars, jumped out of airplanes, dived the oceans, loved and laughed to my fullest and hopefully made lots of lives better by being here. Of course, (S)He'll already know...

I hope you do the same.

Rapture = bliss.  Follow your bliss and savor this wonderful gift called life.

As Michael Stipe and the boys so eloquently put it,  "It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine."