Curios Alberta Street

My foray into sociology, a class on death and dying, keeps my nose to the grindstone, and as I hold my proboscis to the whirling, stony platen, I spend time in places more peaceful and less distracting than home.

This mild spring night, I'm studying a tea shop on Alberta. The warm tones and slow, relaxing music inside are a fine respite from May's chilly and rainy spring weather. The weather is good today, and curious sights out on the street remind me of Moby Dick and Hamlet. A young African-American riding his skateboard as he bends to the left then back to the right, movements almost like a dance, and somehow he stays fixed upon his board while he bows, like a reed, with alacrity. Pip riding the seas of asphalt and concrete. I see an older man in inky attire and gray goatee suggesting he is introspective, and I ask what windy susperations might this Hamlet make today?

Pip was mad by the end of Moby Dick, and madness was one path to the divine. Hamlet doubted this same divinity as he spoke of the fear his consciousness experienced while pondering what lay beyond his life, and this brings me back to my classwork. This week we are tasked with learning the debate over a decision made within a sea of troubles where the quality of life wanes: physician assisted suicide. Here the question "to be, or not to be" is ever so poignant. Is it noble to suffer what some consider an indignity, loss of control over mind and body, or is it better to die while we have our wits and leave this world for the unknown void from where we came?