A facebook friend named Ron Greenough died a few days ago. I don’t know the causes of his demise, but I spent a minute on his timeline and found he posted something (I forget what now) on the 21st. Ron and I never met. Actually, during the last few years, we never exchanged any personal quips.
I believe I got to know him in 2009, soon after my mandatory exile from the Czech Republic. He was some relation of Justin or other. I’m not sure which. I never bothered to find out since it was utterly unimportant to me. I only vaguely recall that we shared some similar spiritual and humouristic views. This, too, was not very important.
He has perished and people are writing on his timeline asking him to rest in peace as if his corpse could somehow absorb the electricity that distributes these messages. I’ll state the obvious and declare that death is a function that has two arguments, or inputs:
- The deceased (or, to be accurate, the fixin’to be deceased)
- A vector or array of people that know the fixin to be deceased
(defn death [human humans]
(map (fn [h]
(affect human h))
humans))The non-deceased humans are run through the blender that I give the function name affect. This function filters parts of the fixin to be deceased according to each non-deceased and modifies the latter with them.
Ron’s death affected me enough to spawn this entry in the Martenblog. I guess, in my life, this impetus was Ron’s purpose. To each non-deceased, a differing impetus.
The subject of celebrities dying this year seems a big deal on social media. Take Prince, for example. Non-deceased humans are raving about him! Fixin to be deceased ones possibly not so much. Prince’s impetus has been to forcibly take control of the minds of multitudes and make them gather into mobbish clusters and celebrate. I did not know Prince personally, but I feel he’d probably have approved. I did not mingle with any mobbish mass, but I did listen to three of his albums the other day.
- Purple Rain
- Around the World in a Day
- 1999
I enjoyed my time with these albums and attempted to actively listen as much as possible. Slaving away over the terminal for the sake of patching up a few bugs for James’s peace of mind interfered with my concentration at times, as usual. Purple Rain is very enjoyable. The second album, less so. 1999 could expunge its own second half and I’d not blink my singular, ogling eye.
Needless to say, I did not tear up for either of these two corpses. Other corpses will probably have the impetus to create a flow of tears from my singular, ogling eye. We’ll see. I may or may not let Martenblog know.
Fuck um.
