Sometimes I look up at the sky when I hear an airplane and I realize that it wasn’t all that long ago that there were no planes in the sky and in the future there may be none again.

Sometimes I travel a road and I watch it clambering with cars and carts and I realize that it was less than a century and a half ago that there were no automobiles and come another century and a half they may have ceased to be. 

Sometimes I go to a Walmart and I duck and dodge the people around me and I realize that only a few years before I was born there were no Walmarts and I close my eyes and I imagine a day when they no longer exist.

Sometimes my phone alerts me of a text message and my entire body groans under the weight of unsolicited communication and I remember a time when I couldn’t be reached and I dream of my old life before text messages and a telephone in my pocket.

Do you ever stop to consider how unfortunate we all are to have been born, lived and died in the age of omnipresent noise and wanton defilement? Do you ever marvel at the cruelty of this cosmic punishment? This roll of the chronological dice that has dropped us into this filthy, unceasingly noisy world. Of all the places and all the planets and all the available points in infinite time, we had to be plopped down here? Oh, callous calendar! Oh, fetid fate!

Do you ever long for the silence of the tomb? The coziness of a crypt? The isolation of the grave? Six feet of earth is a fair amount of insulation. When you think of death as nothing more than noise abatement, it’s not so scary. Insulation, isolation; duration never ending. Silence is golden. Amen.