Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

My Youthful Friendship with Death

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I've never been rattled by human death. I suppose a healthy combination of self-loathing and misanthropy doesn't exactly make a great recipe for sentiment in this area; I'd probably be a better grief counselor for those who have lost pets, since that has always affected me far more deeply. Even the event of losing my most brilliant engineer – which I've written about at some length – didn't really shake me for a few days.

But I bring up death – being in an especially dark mood lately – as a segue to sharing a tale I've been meaning to share for many years. It is about the death of a friend when I was 18 years old, and his name was Kurt McFall.

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