I, bored to death and typing, You, skipping this post cause its not a picture that “speaks to your soul” or is an “image of your heart”.

Sorry, excuse my cynical morning, but boredom makes my thoughts run, and like all over thinking, it doesn’t exactly end with one shitting rainbows.

I had breakfast with my grand-father today if you care to know. He’s old and senile, and today he repeated the lines of Hamlet, over and over and over again. Avoiding conversation. He must have repeated this.. entire piece of script, 8 times one right after the other (from memory).

(Yes we’ve all heard the repeated “to be or not to be, that is the question. But to the read the rest, looking at my grandfather, and being the only audience, the words of Shakespeare tugged on my heart strings.)

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action. -Soft you now!

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in they orisons,

be all my sins remember’d. 

—Hamlet Act 3, Scene 1, 55-87

Long, yes, but then realize that it’s a monologue of death, and for him to repeat it as much as he did, anyone would have felt a sense of wonder, warning, and chill. Was someone passing me a message? I called my mother, and told her of what I was hearing all morning, her reply was interesting, she said,

“He does not think it is death. He focus’s on the part of Ophelia and the sound of his voice. He thinks it is a love poem. I asked him about Hamlet, he did not even know him, or the circumstance he was in.”

So then I listened to him again, as a love poem, and to the sound of his voice. And at that moment, it turned into a memory I would always have of him. This, among the few others.