Football, killing people and Whitman

Last night I watched Monday Night Football in a bar with train-conductor veteran of 3 Iraqi tours who told me about the time he killed a guy in a knife fight in Mogadishu.

To be fair he was fighting for his life. He also told me he ran over a dunk guy with his train one time.

Tonight I ran by a church and watched a baby being baptized and saw the very moment as the family all leaned in while the priest was pouring holy water on the baby's crying face and I thought – isn't life amazing?

So cliche I know.

It's also cliche to say that we are capable of great love as well as great evil but most cliches are true.

So I don't really care.

I thought about what it would feel like to have to shove a K-bar up through someone's jaw just to save my own life. Then I thought about those 40 or so people in that church and how I could feel the love that was passing through them all that moment and how it hit me like a wave through the glass of that church window.

Then I thought how lucky I am to be privileged enough to see these things. And I thought about having the ache to describe it and something that Whitman wrote:

"Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send the sunrise out of me."

I think it means he's rejoicing and reveling in the beauty of life and acknowledging that if he couldn't describe it – if he couldn't write it – he would die.

I understand what he's talking about.