Well, that was grim…

Who knows what came over me. Thought it, said it, there you have it. I think the weird thing isn’t that I’m having thoughts about the big Game Over, but that I went almost completely without them for so long. When I was young and sick and my nights were full of nightmares, that feeling was never far away. I saw a fair amount of death when I was young — I remember being shocked when someone in college told me she’d never been to a funeral. That was just inconceivable to me. From the time I was 6 until I was 18, there was a fair procession of the dead — grandfather, grandmother, uncle, friends’ father, best friend since kindergarten, two friends who were brother and sister, and a mentor. And then, when I was 25, my father. So mortality wasn’t really too far out of my thoughts for a long time. When Hannah was born, it was as if something had been lifted and I just didn’t worry or think about it any more. But for a little while now, it’s been creeping back into my thoughts. There have been a number of “untimely” deaths around, not really people I know but people I know of, some a little older than me, some a little younger, and it sets me to thinking. Carl Hiaasen’s latest book features someone who is absolutely obsessed with the ages at which notable people died — I’m not quite at that level, but I’ll be looking at an old movie and it will occur to me that everyone in the movie has died, that I’m looking at images of people who no longer exist. That’s the kind of thing that gets to me. Photographs of children from a century ago, children who have grown up and gotten old and died. Sometimes the not-knowing in their expressions is overwhelming. (Though, growing up when they did, many of them were probably already intimate with death.)

Bah. Enough death . . . bring me the head of Internet Explorer: Apple has a new browser, and it kicks ass. Fast? So fast.