Final Thoughts: Beginner’s Guide to Death

by Mark Mathew Braunstein

In a lively collection of fables, lyrics, humor, aphorisms, riddles, rhyme, and reason, FINAL THOUGHTS presents one mortal's quest to laugh at death. A book review stands to its book, as a book stands to life. Beware single-star reviews of books about death that speak more about the reviewer than about the book.
 

Introduction

01 - PARABLES and About Paradoxes and Foibles

02 - EPIGRAMS and As Life Is a Joke, so Death Is Its Laughter

03 - REAL-LIFE DIALOGS with Cryptic True Tales of the Crypt

04 - The LOST ART of in Art as in Life (or is it the reverse?)

05 - PORTRAIT of the ARTIST as a YOUNG Story Without a Beginning or a Middle, Just an End

06 - EULOGIES to TWO WHO DIED TOO To Two Not Forgotten

07 - WALKING to OUR Walking in the March of Time

List of Illustrations

98 pages, Paperback

Published May 22, 2019

About the author

Mark Mathew Braunstein's writer rap sheet includes six books, one praised by the Washington Post as “remarkably intelligent.” The diverse topics of his books and more than ninety ephemeral articles in glossy magazines include art, literature, holistic health, vegan vegetarianism, wildlife conservation, mobility disability, indoor gardening, cannabis culture, and drug law reform. His reader rap sheet includes the nearly entire oeuvres of way too many dead white males such as Melville and Thoreau, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Rilke and Kafka, Blake and Beckett, Plato and Epictetus, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and his guru and mentor and doctor Seuss, to name some whose rhymes and rants he somehow survived while neither going crazy nor growing wise.

Painting himself into a corner as an abstract artist, he did time as an inmate of Manhattan until he made his prison break and bartered his brush for a pen. For the next quarter of a century, he was on the lam at a hideout in a wildlife refuge in Connecticut where deer did not flee him, where chickadees perched upon him, and where nocturnal wildlife parked themselves on his driveway. That nocturnal species of youthful female hominids engaged in mating rituals with random older males. The females inspired Braunstein to write a field guide about them, titled Good Girls on Bad Drugs.

As a paraplegic since 1990 and a Bad Boy on Good Drugs, his use of cannabis is medicinal for below the waist and recreational above. His 55 years as a pothead culminated in 2022 with the publication of his book, Mindful Marijuana Smoking: Health Tips for Cannabis Smokers.

While he has neither attained enlightenment nor seen god, he someday may look into the future and see you reading this GoodReads webpage, or reading his own at www.MarkBraunstein.ORG ("org" for organic, or whatever else may come to your mind)