This installment of my blog would normally be a writing tip, but Halloween is coming up so I thought I would change things up a bit.  In honor of Halloween I’m going to tell you a true ghost story.  I know many of you don’t believe in ghosts, but try to keep an open mind about what I am about to tell you.
Years ago my brother served aboard the USS James K. Polk.  For those of you that don’t know the James K. Polk was a ballistic missile submarine of the United States Navy.  She was converted from a ballistic missile submarine to a slow attack submarine.  This conversion included the removal of her missiles and the adding of dry deck shelter to her deck.  To make a long story short all the changes made her into a platform to be used by US Navy SEALs.  If any of you've seen the movie Act of Valor the submarine in that movie is the USS Kamehameha.  She also under went the same conversion.  Below are some pictures of the James K. Polk before and after the conversion. The James K. Polk was decommissioned in 1999 and the boat was scrapped, all except for the sail.  The sail is presently on display at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

My brother served aboard the James K. Polk during the conversion and afterwards.  The story that I’m about to relate is one he told me.  He never gave a specific time frame of when this happened.  He was on guard duty.  His area of responsibility was the after deck area.  Another guard was forward at the gang plank.  He knew that there were a few other crewman below deck, none of them higher ranking that a Petty Officer First Class.  While he was on watch he saw a Chief Petty Officer leaning against the conning tower smoking a cigarette.  The next time he looked the Chief was gone.  He later talked to the other sailor guarding the gang plank and was told that noone got on or off the boat while they were on guard duty.  The question is where did the Chief come from and where did he go?  My brother later learned that a Chief had hung himself years before in the missile control room.

There’s my ghost story.  I know it wasn’t much, but I thought you might enjoy it.

Immortality is something we all strive for in one form or another.  The recent death of one of my favorite authors, Tom Clancy got me thinking about my own mortality and my quest for immortality.  None of us ever achieves true immortality and by this I mean living forever here on the Earth.  Some of us do achieve a semblance of immortality.
The ones I speak of are the artists. For ease of writing I include under the title artists all of the painters, architects, sculptors, musicians, singers, actors and writers.  These artists create works that last beyond their own lifetimes.  Works that they pour a bit of themselves into.  In one of my previous blogs I explained how the writer does this by transforming their secret selves into lies.  Other artist may carry out this quest for immortality differently, but they all pull from that same place inside themselves and share it with the world.
Often the world misunderstand what it is being shown.  The world changes over time and truths once universally known are lost.  Pretty much everyone knows of the works of William Shakespeare, but knowing of them and truly understanding them are two different things.  Most of Shakespeare’s plays are performed in Modern English.  By doing so Shakespeare’s immortality is slowly fading into nothingness.  For by performing them in the modern tongue and not in the original Early Modern English we are missing many of the truths that he tried to convey to us.  The subtle yet intricate play on words, the rhymes and the jokes are lost.
So even the concept of immortality is a false dream.  False dream or not we still strive to achieve it, but why?  For even a short stint of immortality is far better than fading into nothingness when our time comes to an end.