1. How can consciousness be defined? Can consciousness exist after death?
I once conjured my dead father via Ouija board. He said What happened 
to the no contact order?     Ha! I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in
haunting: phantasmagoria of memory. I spoke to the limp plastic-baggie
of him and it listened. His name, sharpied on Ziploc, shimmered. I asked
the Ouija board: how’s Hell?? and he said: Hot??  He got funnier in death.
There’s no Hell. He’s nowhere. But I’m half-convinced he’s reading this. 

2. Could a probabilistic model accurately predict the lifetime of humanity?
Dad moonlit as a doomsday prepper. Mom blamed National Geographic. 
His alleged apocalypses varied: solar flares or polar shifts or it’s something
about the power grid? Imagine His backyard-shed bunker, His makeshift 
throne of milk-cartons. Dad died before the world, and the shed stunk of
spoiled peaches, roach-ridden rice. Dad and I’d rehearse our bug-out plan.
Mom said that if/when the rapture came, she’d sit and wait for God to die.

3. Ideopathy refers to diseases of apparent spontaneous origin. Find a cure?
Trick question. I don’t believe in spontaneous death. Want to know what
really killed Dad? Try a fistful of cigarettes. Untreated diabetes and end-
stage renal failure. Decades of Rush Limbaugh. That seizured slur of his
voice. Fistful of cigarettes until it’s just fists. Another unsigned divorce
paper. That one road-trip where the Jeep swerved onto the highway. And
me, I think. Yes. To survive it, I had to kill it, so whatever it is, I killed it.

4. Do black holes have an internal structure? If so, how might it be probed?
So bored of bigness. That vacuous vacuum of space. Dark matter doesn’t
matter here. Made myself endless. Collapsed inwards. So strong, nothing
escaped. Devoured gravity. Typhoon of funeral-wear on bedroom floor. 
Swirl and I’m so self-centered. Light can’t live here. Sound can’t travel.
I cosplayed infinity, but I’d always end early. I vanish into life: that black
hole of my blackout curtains. In the eulogy, I called him an event horizon.

5. What caused multicellular life to rapidly accelerate in the Cambrian Era?
Philosophers need answers that don’t double as cemeteries. I philosophize
the Cambrian Era: unicellular splotches of life all somehow synchronized-
swam into life. So Dad was once a cephalopod was once its mitochondrion 
was once atomic dust and now he’s regular dust. So, I ask the Ouija Board:
Was this apocalypse or anti-apocalypse? Both. Birth and burial at sea. Mom
loves the ocean’s gentle vastness, that waterlogged garden of life.               I want to live.

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