One evening, a man asked his wife, "Darling, if I won the lottery, what would you do?"

His wife thought for a moment and then replied, "I'd take half of it and leave you."

"Is that so?" the husband replied. "Well, I won $20 on a scratch-off this morning. Here's a ten. Now get the hell out."

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I'm not sure how I missed this in the news.

A few months ago, two grammatical vigilantes, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, set out on a nationwide journey to correct stupidity and ignorance. From March to May, they traveled across this great country to - as they put it - "stamp out as many typos as we can find, in public signage and other venues where innocent eyes may be befouled by vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language."

When they "graded" a sign at Grand Canyon National Park by using "Wite-Out" and a permanent marker to correct a misplaced comma and apostrophe, they were charged by the National Park Service with damaging public property (they left intact a creative spelling of the word "immense" - rendered in the original as "emense"). They pleaded guilty to the offense in federal court in August.

As an embarrassed citizen of a nation in which so many people are incapable of speaking their native tongue properly, much less reducing it to writing in the accepted fashion, I believe these men should be hailed as heroes. The did not damage the errant signage. If anything, they improved it, and nowhere on the books is there any statute - state or federal - prohibiting the improvement of public property.

As an aside, I feel compelled to relate a story whose veracity I cannot confirm, but I hope it is true, just for the entertainment value. It seems that a certain fraternity at college in Boston has a tradition of arming its pledges with a can of brass polish and sending them on a mission to shine the scrotum of a horse statue, leaving the rest of the statue weathered and tarnished. The statue is located in a traffic circle and is positioned such that motorists stopped at a traffic light cannot avoid noticing the horse's sparkly balls amid the contrasting dullness of the remainder of the structure. When complaints are lodged with the police, they point out to the complainants that there is no crime in cleaning public property.

Returning to the matter at hand, I question what message is sent by a nation which promotes and protects its own semi-literacy. In a court system with a rich tradition for stare decisis, is this a judicially-enacted alteration of the rules of punctuation? Is this a governmentally sanctioned celebration of ineffective education? Is Strunk and White's The Elements of Style now relegated to the same villainous underground status as The Anarchist's Cookbook?

I think we're all a little stupider now, as a result of this case.

As a fitting epilogue for this post, I would note that the article linked above ends, "In addition to being banned from national parks for a year, the two are barred from modifying any public signs and must pay $3,035 to repair the Grand Canyon sign."

In my book, they've already repaired it.

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There is a stillness to the stars, a dignified peace that is disturbed only by our noisy little world tucked into an outer spiral arm of our galaxy.

I look to the stars for solace. When the weight of the world is upon me, bearing witness to the enormity of the universe makes our planet seem insignificant by contrast, as if something so miniscule couldn't possibly be as difficult as it sometimes feels it is.

This is a peace a person can only learn on a lonely quiet road at midnight in the middle of nowhere, an isolated place where the universe reveals its naked self in all its splendor.

If one listens closely on nights like this, the universe can be heard to whisper, in a language somewhere between baby talk and the King James Bible, "Be still."

Men get up nights,
look out at the city lights
and wonder where they turned wrong
and why life is so long.

- Unknown

When did we become so domesticated? What happened to make us so docile?

Why have our lives become so boring that gas mileage and interest rates and weed eaters and plasma televisions have become our obsessions?

Let's face it. We've become too bland for our own good, and in so doing, we've become creatures of habit. We wake up each day and, for the most part, everything we think about are the same things we thought about the previous day. We say the same things, go through the same motions, and do the same things over and over again, amazingly unaware that somehow, we think that tomorrow, something new might happen.

It's fear - fear of anything new, fear of taking chances, fear of adventure. There's safety in repetition, so much so that we actually spend a lot of time living those adventures watching horror films or sporting events to vicariously tempt that fight or flight adrenaline rush snug in the safety of our living room couch.

We've developed something in our brains that makes every cliff appear to be twice its real height when we look down from the top, and everything within us screams, "Don't even think about it!"

It's a fear of death. It's the fear that comes with the knowledge that one minute, a person can be walking and talking and breathing, and the next, he's an object.

It's gotten to the point that we believe we're simply here on earth to kill time - and it's killing us without our even being aware of it. We think we can hold onto life by hiding it, by protecting it with all we have, that we can ward off death by being dead. That's the fear.

Death is not what makes life futile, however, but rather what makes it precious. The fragility of fine crystal isn't its weakness, but its quality. Same goes with life.

The paradox is that the courage to live takes its form in a readiness to die. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire to live with a strange recklessness about dying. He must seek his life in a furious indifference to it.

Life is an occasion. Rise to it.

And we're off...again.

I'm participating in both NaNoWriMo (that's National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated) again this year. Lots of writing ahead for me during the next 30 days.

This is my fourth year of NaNoWriMo, and I've got a three-for-three winning streak going. Each year, I've approached All Saints' Day, it has been with much anticipation. There's a certain excitement in starting fresh with a new beginning, starting with a clean slate, and I'm off to a good opening. I just finished pumping out 2,852 words for day one.

On another front, there's big news. A few nights ago, I got a call from Sarah. In the aftermath of our parting ways, I never expected to hear from her again, so her phone call was a complete surprise.

We talked for about two hours. At first, we were both very tentative with one another. I wasn't sure why she called, and I don't think she was either.

The more we talked, the more we opened up with one another, and by the time we got off the phone, it was as if nothing had ever happened. Our history, I guess, was storied enough that we realized there was too much to leave behind.

In the end, we both realized that we wanted to give it another shot. Apologies were offered, pardons were granted, a new beginning has been unveiled, another slate wiped clean.