VIKINGS WERE CRAZY

It's Thor's Day. Time to break out Mjolnir, jump on our chariot drawn by two magic goats, and go raise some Hell. I wonder what would happen if we could all do that. If for one day, we were each granted a super power, some god like ability to cause thunder, or have super strength, or turn invisible. What would we all do? Wreak havoc? Save the world? Try to do one and inadvertently do the other? Would we have a bunch of yahoos engage in free for all battles, like the dead vikings would in Valhalla each day? In Norse mythology, after a warrior dies bravely in battle, they get taken to Valhalla, sort of Norse Heaven, and they hang out and eat and drink and are basically immune to injuries. So, each night, after getting loaded, they would fight each other, chopping off limbs and what not, and then poof, they would be fine, go to sleep, get up the next day, and do it all again. Forever and ever until the end of the world, which they called Ragnorok long before there was the movie of the same name. I always found that aspect of Norse mythology funny, sad, and totally believable. You find out there is indeed an afterlife, and what do you do? The same thing you did when you weren't sure there was anything out there after you shuffled off this mortal coil. It was both hilarious and tragic to me.

In the myths, they don't really go into what happens to the women when they die. Just the men who are warriors. The really good fighters, the ones who caused the most destruction, went to Valhalla. The rest of the men went underground to Hel. The women went Elsewhere.  That made sense to me when I was a kid, because it was clear that men were not so good on how they treated women. I mean, this was back when the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, was in the news a lot. And there were a lot of folks who could not stand the idea of making it a law that women had the same rights as men. Strange but true.

That's the thing, I guess, my mind is going to this morning. The world is in a strange place right now, but it has always been in a strange place, at least since we humans took center stage. We do the stupidest shit imaginable, both to ourselves and to each other. We pollute. We treat each other terribly. We have wars. We have genocides. We cause the extinction of species after species.  And yet, we also create music and poetry. We tell jokes. We dance out of the sheer joy of being alive. Some people thing we do the good things to balance out the bad, that without the one there couldn't be the other. I think that's a lot of crap. I am sure there is a way we could all find spiritual fulfillment, dance every day, sing, laugh, and still find life exciting without being insane and treating the rest of the universe like a toy meant to be kicked. I bet we can, and I bet we will. In any event, it is a strange thing to be a human being. Strange and wonderful, and never a dull moment. We have had a lot of hard times before, even just in our short little lives. Wars, disasters, riots. In just the past fifty years, so many things have gone down that are awful. How can we be that shocked at our current situation? Is it just that the uncertainty of life is being laid out so clearly? The randomness of fate? We are all vulnerable, always. We are all one microsecond away from a Valkyrie swooping down and taking us away from all this. As the conspiracy nuts like to point out, death is a daily event. Forty thousand men and women everyday, as the song goes. But I don't see that as a rationale for not caring. I see it as a reason to live each moment completely, to try our best to make however much time we have count. To fill our souls with love and compassion. To stop complaining about our woes and start celebrating the fact we exist in the first place.

So yeah. Thor's Day. Do you want to make it rain?

Here's a song and film sequence. It's the Ride of the Valkyries from Apocalypse Now.