In some respects this seems, to me, an apt metaphor for life... or rather this life. Zen posits that nothing in this life is without cause... it's just that most of the causes of what's happening to you now are rooted in past lives - karma - which upon recognizing in this life, with hope, you begin to expiate... But if you never come to believe in karma, then it wouldn't matter if you were Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas the Heretic, the bastard child of James Randi and Richard Feynmen, or Tammuz... at the end of the day, everything that happened to you would just seem like shit randomly falling out of the sky... or washing up on shore, sent by your
god(s).

And even if you do come to believe in karma, it's not like you can say on a day-to-day basis, "okay... I get it... 100 lbs. of frozen chili fell out of the sky and landed on me because in a past life I [fill in your heinous crime here]."... and this makes the things that wash up on our shores that much more interesting... and the choices we make that much more important.

At some point in the future, you might find some amusing musings here. What, when, and if, is contingent on how I'm feeling, what I'm currently most pissed off about, and how I'm feeling (yes... it's meant to be there twice). One of the reasons I'm doing this is as a learning experience - I just need something concrete to practice with while I learn some web stuff, or I won't ever get around to learning it. And in the process, some interesting cargo might wash up.