Dear God and Argentine, Thank you for helping me to finally realize how much I don’t know including things like hard versus soft science, ghosts, rocks, cell phone apps, touchscreens, new music, clothing, current idiomatic expressions, jigsaw puzzles, numerology, self-care, moisturizers, social media, tasteful home decor (other than Southwest style) and fill in the blank (here). My oversized ego doesn’t always appreciate it, especially the part about rocks and my moving them back and forth in the front yard trying to get them “right”but I actually do get the point.

In retrospect and in all honesty a lot of my so-called knowledge is cursory, made up, self manufactured, quickly googled on the down low or is comprised of momentary facts about something soon to be replaced, updated, recycled or is already completely obsolete like landlines, wall mount rotary phones with 50 foot stretch cords and many other time-limited trends like bell bottoms, 60’s music, old black and white movies and other ultimately perishable products. Like my white-washed once “custom” kitchen and kitchen pantry now filled to the brim with dollar store canned goods, candy and condiments I tend to scoff at expiration dates of any kind including about myself, my so-called superior knowledge and even my own inevitable mortality.

Now that I think of it I also pretty much just pretend to understand the whole AI and “quantum” thing that I sometimes write about in my CaptCliff blogs like I’m Einstein, Wittgenstein or John Preskill. I’m none of the above and it’s very likely a super complicated, always evolving and way over my head topic. Unlike the Iliad or The Scarlet Letter (both classic books I pretend to have read cover to cover growing up) the “Cliff Notes” about quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement and super intelligence probably don’t do it justice.

I spent the whole first half of my long life convincing myself that I know more than I really do and I’m now spending much of the last part of my life recognizing that I don’t really know anything for sure. As a little boy, I suspected that the closing monologue in the 1957 sci-fi movie “The Incredible Shrinking Man” was right about something important which the overdramatic musical score hinted at but I didn’t really know what the Shrinking Man meant and honestly it scared me. Now at 73 years old I realize life and death is less something to fear or really be scared about as much as it’s something to appreciate, to cherish and then to feel increasingly liberated about. The most difficult part is watching people you love and care about including ones beloved pets like Harmony get old, get sick, and inevitably die.

Speaking of shrinking I also used to feel pissed off at God for making me kind of short at 5’7” inches tall …and now at 5’6” and a quarter (if I’m lucky at the doctor’s office) I realize we are all shrinking slowly back to where we came from. From an ego/ fear/grasping/“I know better” perspective being on the short side, having curvature of the spine at age 15 and NEVER EVER hitting a home run in baseball, kickball or anything else may have given me a slight existential advantage…and not just in terms of radical acceptance or having more legroom than any basketball player on commercial airplanes. Dont get me wrong. I hate admitting this publicly. Part of me (hopefully a smaller and smaller part) still resents knowing that you (God and Argentine) know I’m a know-it-all. It’s still annoying and embarrassing to be wrong about so many different things. It’s still very tempting to blame God, you and anyone else (including the dog(s) for my many mistakes, false assumptions or failure to heed my own “wise” (Yoda) sage-like advice. But I do think I’m slowly getting better at this shrinking thing called life. I guess it wouldn’t help to point out that that’s called entropy in Information Science and thermodynamics. Lol.