I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought
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The many guidebooks for the dead, from antiquity to current times, presume that death is not an ending but rather a transitional journey that requires attentive planning. Seemingly ironically, these guidebooks are simultaneously about living life to the fullest, comporting oneself while keeping body and soul together, and knowing that our spiritual destination is inextricably tied to our corporeal choice making and conduct. As Ptolemy Tompkins notes in The Modern Book of the Dead, those who hate and fear death are unable to live happily, while for those who think the right way about death, "life loses that gloom and becomes something entirely different: something larger, stranger, and in- finitely more promising and positive than we might ever have imagined."
Prof. Oddfellow's Books of the Dead is a distillation of twenty-four books of the dead from around the world and across the centuries. Each book’s most intriguing, poetic, and useful revelations are painstakingly gathered here.
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It's only the two-eyed people that we're socially uncomfortable with. "The visit of a two-eyed child," from the rare Twilight Fairy Tales by Maud Booth, 1906.
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A surprising percentage of folks on the internet don't actually know How to Look at Pictures (Hendrik Willem Van Loon, 1938).
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If you feel that "we are living through a time of unprecedented and troubling change," recall that so did folks in 2004 (see clipping), and verily so did folks in every year of recorded history. As the archives of old newspapers, magazines, and books make perfectly clear, humanity is always at a crossroads, and it is always the "end of the world." We might actually find comfort in that, and in the Buddhist conception that past-present-future is all of a piece. Clipping from Suddenly They Heard Footsteps by Dan Yashinsky, 2004.
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"Good manners can cover up the most complex of feelings." From Dark Shadows episode 357.
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"A day of changes." From Wid's Daily, 1919.
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They're being facetious here, but it's common advice. From Lighted Pathway, 1981.
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"All afternoon, it was obvious to me that things were not going so well." From Innis Herald, 1989.
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Page 102 of 173
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Original Content Copyright © 2026 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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