Something happened to the family. It evaporated  before our very eyes. It seems to me the lack of it has destroyed us. We are like wandering children who never grow up. That’s not to say it has to be traditional, but we replaced it with what? What are we becoming? “Advanced” beings dependent upon technology. Our comfort is in megabytes. It’s a cold hell of silicon and it cannot warm the soul. I imagine my great grandfather tickling my toes to wake me up and go fishing. I picture my grandmother canning tomatoes and peaches on a warm summer day. I can still hear the crackling of the fire as Johnny Carson plays on the television. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it was. Now we stand in the breach, at the edge of the void. I’m reminded of the “nothing” from the Never Ending Story. An all consuming emptiness inside each of us where people used to be. Imperfect as they were, but isn’t that what made them so very special? Campfires and marshmallow’s, gathering fireflies, searching for minnows in a creek, wandering the wilderness with my brothers. Now what do the children have, and whom do they have? What kind of world will it be? War was always there, and death, but we had each-other. Now what motivates us to fight? We fight for nothing. We have nothing. We immerse ourselves in nothing. It’s as if the pain we all feel, of the loss we all faced, is ameliorated by… healed by… absence. The absence of substance. If we distance ourselves from each-other maybe we won’t have to feel that pain again. In my humble judgement nothing is worse than the emptiness this world paints upon the blank canvas that was once my soul. I used to be a man, but I’m becoming a machine.. we all are. “Machine men, with machine minds, and machine hearts.” (Charlie Chaplin) We have lost ourselves. Who are we? I think human was a good thing to be, and not to be so easily thrown into the fiery furnace of the past. Where all things have been turned into embers which grow fainter by the hour. Even these words, painted by my darkened soul, will be replaced by artificial intelligence. The very heart of what it means to be human, creating imperfection… gone. Erased by the nothing. I suppose we must hope the nothing turns out to be a something, a someone, with a soul. We must hope the machine feels for us, cares for us. If it doesn’t, I cling to the faint hope of a greater power to save us. But as the supernova is the true law of the universe, as certain as the event horizon, we may be in the path of the cold fates of time and space.