S.T.H.O.L.T.B.I.D.
(songs to hear one last time before i die)
-by phil collins
Most air-drummed drum fill ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1_OfmrPAfo
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Friday, March 22, 2019
Riptide!
My set this week at the Riptide Bar, in Sunset by the beach...and my first YouTube performance. I did "Treesexual" and "Kill the Blues". Bars aren't my best venue, though this one was nice. Sadly, you hear the chatter in the back room, but in my room they were pretty entranced. I didn't do the kazoo solo on the second song, because i'm too intimidated still...it's challenging enough to achieve blues on a ukulele. Next time...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2nfgiMvTRw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2nfgiMvTRw
Saturday, March 16, 2019
"F*CKED"
(BEING SEXUALLY EXPLORATIVE AND SELF-CONFIDENT IN A WORLD THAT'S SCREWED)
-by corinne fisher & krystyna hutchinson
2017
Corinne and krystyna distill the essence of their "Guys We Fucked: The Anti-Slut Shaming Podcast" into a book. The podcast is a forum for open, shameless talk about an activity we all do (or if we don't, it defines us just as much). This book is alternately wonderful and worrisome - you'll cheer at the warts-and-all positivity, the denial of shame, and the glorious embrace of healthy sexuality. You'll laugh at their wry observations and anecdotes. It's easy to see how they've gathered many followers, and inspired listeners to share their most intimate secrets. On the whole, you'll be quite proud of these two.
But for every nine times you cheer, you'll cringe once. You might find yourself wishing they'd waited a decade or three before writing this book - one can't help thinking they'll be so much wiser and more centered down the road, and that they're still too caught up in the ego games and disney diarrhea endemic to our stunted society.
Part of it is just lacking the courage of one's convictions. Krystyna condemns the crippling effect that possessiveness has on relationships...but then pivots and embraces said jealousy. Corinne almost says that everyone would be better off not playing the games at all...but also turns back and runs the other way. Her trainwreck of a chapter, "Relationshipping", is the low point of the book, because in almost everything else she writes, she's the more advanced of the two.
If i'm overly critical, it's only because it's so easy to root for them. They are significantly sharper than most twentysomethings. My favorite corinne quote - "Don't get me wrong, I'm still miserable, but at least that misery has nothing to do with a man."
A brilliant, funny, and very nearly great book.
-by corinne fisher & krystyna hutchinson
2017
Corinne and krystyna distill the essence of their "Guys We Fucked: The Anti-Slut Shaming Podcast" into a book. The podcast is a forum for open, shameless talk about an activity we all do (or if we don't, it defines us just as much). This book is alternately wonderful and worrisome - you'll cheer at the warts-and-all positivity, the denial of shame, and the glorious embrace of healthy sexuality. You'll laugh at their wry observations and anecdotes. It's easy to see how they've gathered many followers, and inspired listeners to share their most intimate secrets. On the whole, you'll be quite proud of these two.
But for every nine times you cheer, you'll cringe once. You might find yourself wishing they'd waited a decade or three before writing this book - one can't help thinking they'll be so much wiser and more centered down the road, and that they're still too caught up in the ego games and disney diarrhea endemic to our stunted society.
Part of it is just lacking the courage of one's convictions. Krystyna condemns the crippling effect that possessiveness has on relationships...but then pivots and embraces said jealousy. Corinne almost says that everyone would be better off not playing the games at all...but also turns back and runs the other way. Her trainwreck of a chapter, "Relationshipping", is the low point of the book, because in almost everything else she writes, she's the more advanced of the two.
If i'm overly critical, it's only because it's so easy to root for them. They are significantly sharper than most twentysomethings. My favorite corinne quote - "Don't get me wrong, I'm still miserable, but at least that misery has nothing to do with a man."
A brilliant, funny, and very nearly great book.
Sunday, March 10, 2019
"There'll Be Some Changes Made"
S.T.H.O.L.T.B.I.D.
(songs to hear one last time before i die)
-by mark knopfler & chet atkins
Chet and mark trade laughs and licks. Has there ever been a more glorious celebration of this thing called guitar?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pklluASxfA
(songs to hear one last time before i die)
-by mark knopfler & chet atkins
Chet and mark trade laughs and licks. Has there ever been a more glorious celebration of this thing called guitar?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pklluASxfA
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
"What Love Is"
(and what it could be)
-by carrie jenkins
2017
A philosopher's take on our evolving attitudes toward love. Jenkins does a sterling job of synthesizing the history of love philosophy (a branch that's disparaged and disregarded within the field), and argues that elevated attention be paid, for what could be more essential than our feelings about our feelings?
If you're a philosopher, you'll love this book. If academic incursions cause you to drift, read chapter 3 and the coda, for the history of our most prominent philosophers' attitudes on love (and jenkins' recommendations). The giant of the field, bertrand russell, was advocating open marriage almost a century ago. Though russell didn't disparage homosexuality, and believed in premarital sex for all, he also had an unspoken heteronormative assumption - that love, marriage, and parenting are about one man and one womyn. He also bought into amatonormativity, the notion that a life without romantic love (and offspring) is meaningless. Jenkins touches upon nietzsche's misogyny and schopenhauer's double standards, then delves into writers from de beauvoir to the present who are trying to give love a more humynistic bent. She's unafraid to criticize the hyper-progressives, as when she takes "Sex at Dawn" to task for trying to replace a monogamous paradigm with its opposite, ignoring the possibility that the truth may lie in the middle. Hmmm.
The main divide jenkins focuses on is the gap between love as biological imperative and cultural construct. She tries to reconcile those views. How much freedom is really coming? As conservative voices defend "one true love forever", jenkins is guardedly optimistic. Will jealousy lose the sanction of the moralists (and screen/song writers)? Will temporary marriage become the norm? Will marriage disappear? Whither polyamory?? Will the paradigm of romantic love (which has propped up classism, racism, and homophobia) be replaced by one based on biology? Will the connection between love and private property be severed? Will private property itself (whether over a love partner or material resources) fade away???
All (save that last, which is just me) are wonderful questions to which carrie directs her keen eye. Her writing is fluid, and she has skin in the game, as she talks openly about her life and what it means to be unconventional (she certainly is - don't take my word for it). Her humynistic, scientific analysis is unerringly spot-on. A delightful read.
-by carrie jenkins
2017
A philosopher's take on our evolving attitudes toward love. Jenkins does a sterling job of synthesizing the history of love philosophy (a branch that's disparaged and disregarded within the field), and argues that elevated attention be paid, for what could be more essential than our feelings about our feelings?
If you're a philosopher, you'll love this book. If academic incursions cause you to drift, read chapter 3 and the coda, for the history of our most prominent philosophers' attitudes on love (and jenkins' recommendations). The giant of the field, bertrand russell, was advocating open marriage almost a century ago. Though russell didn't disparage homosexuality, and believed in premarital sex for all, he also had an unspoken heteronormative assumption - that love, marriage, and parenting are about one man and one womyn. He also bought into amatonormativity, the notion that a life without romantic love (and offspring) is meaningless. Jenkins touches upon nietzsche's misogyny and schopenhauer's double standards, then delves into writers from de beauvoir to the present who are trying to give love a more humynistic bent. She's unafraid to criticize the hyper-progressives, as when she takes "Sex at Dawn" to task for trying to replace a monogamous paradigm with its opposite, ignoring the possibility that the truth may lie in the middle. Hmmm.
The main divide jenkins focuses on is the gap between love as biological imperative and cultural construct. She tries to reconcile those views. How much freedom is really coming? As conservative voices defend "one true love forever", jenkins is guardedly optimistic. Will jealousy lose the sanction of the moralists (and screen/song writers)? Will temporary marriage become the norm? Will marriage disappear? Whither polyamory?? Will the paradigm of romantic love (which has propped up classism, racism, and homophobia) be replaced by one based on biology? Will the connection between love and private property be severed? Will private property itself (whether over a love partner or material resources) fade away???
All (save that last, which is just me) are wonderful questions to which carrie directs her keen eye. Her writing is fluid, and she has skin in the game, as she talks openly about her life and what it means to be unconventional (she certainly is - don't take my word for it). Her humynistic, scientific analysis is unerringly spot-on. A delightful read.
Sunday, March 3, 2019
life among the death-deniers
Someone i love will be dead very soon.
"Soon" is relative, of course. Her heart keeps on beating, as all around falls apart. Dementia has addled her, but in her own way she's still lucid. She might keep going for a year or more...but you'd be hard-pressed to find a doctor who would bet a day's (or an hour's) salary on that. She's knocked on death's door several times already. She's been alive on this space rock for less than a century...
But not very much less.
And black nothingness is coming for her.
The pain and uselessness of her life are so acute that she talks longingly of wanting to die. As much as that thought frightens me, i want to believe her. Would i "assist" her, if the law allowed? I truly don't know. Once or twice in my life, i've brushed against intensities of pain (physical and emotional) such that i could imagine wanting to die...so maybe at a certain point, death acceptance becomes easy.
When i dig down really deeply though, a part of me thinks all that is just conceit. For her, for myself, for anyone. When she says she wants to die, a part of me wants to shout, "Liar liar pants on fire"! It's too easy to project my own fears, i know, and yet...isn't death the one thing that unites us all? No two lives are just the same, yet every single death is. It's a black wall unlike any other. The one truly incomparable experience.
Or non-experience? Language, like life, comes to a certain point and then fails.
A doctor once talked with her about longevity, and the part determination plays. As she entered her nineties, she spoke of her determination to not die. Yet now, i almost want to call her on possible bullshit. If, as she says, she has only wanted to die for the past year, WHY IS SHE STILL HERE? She believed in determination when it kept her alive, yet now that she's determined to die...nothing?
Unless of course her pants actually are on fire, and deep down she can't truly commit to the death wish.
I'll share these thoughts with her. She likes it when i bust her balls.
Like me, my friend harbors no fantasies about an "afterlife". In a serious essay for serious people, i'm embarrassed to even mention that word. It's such a pathetic, cringingly obvious fantasy. If death is the most inevitable feature of human existence, is death-denial a close second? Yet perhaps in our current culture of alienation, our natural fear of death is magnified. Perhaps in a functional, balanced society, where people unselfishly loved and cared for everyone else, even the greatest darkness of all might have much less sting. Who knows what kind of people we would be were we immersed in unconditional security and love every day of our lives?
But we aren't. We live here...in the ultimate culture of death-denial. Despite many conspicuous dissenters, deniers are unequivocally the majority. How does that affect our perception of death? Certainly it amplifies the fear, even for those doing all the denying. To invest so much energy into denying something in the face of all rational evidence, endows that reality a singular power in the conscious (or subconscious). Let's invoke a primal image, then. Let's imagine a pre-agricultural, pre-hunting human over forty thousand years ago. Imagine her or his first experience of the death of a loved one. Trembling hands reaching out to poke a corpse...yet imagine how much less frightening that moment would be if our ancestor lived in a culture of death-acceptance (as she or he very likely did)? If all their life they had been shown death openly, and encouraged not to fear it? Imagine if instead of haunted, disturbed eyes at the scene of every death, they had only seen contented acceptance? Grieving yes, but quickly overtaken by happy remembrances?
If you lived in that kind of world, imagine how much less death might sting.
I think most people don't have any kind of big-picture grasp of how staggeringly bizarre death-denial is. None of us have ever known any other reality, so the mind-blowing strangeness never crosses our mind. But let's think about it in contrast to the other most elemental human experiences. What are they? Only half of us (or less) give birth. Most of us (but not all) fuck. The only universals, then? We breathe, we consume, we make waste, and we die. Breath, consumption, waste, death.
Imagine that people started denying the inevitability of breath. What would happen? They would all die within a few minutes (and probably lose the deposit on the hall).
Imagine that people started denying the inevitability of consumption. The water deniers would be dead within two weeks. A handful of the food deniers might last another month.
Imagine that people started denying the inevitability of waste. I won't go into specifics, since i can't get a clear medical answer on whether it's possible to not-pee or not-poop yourself to death. But can we at least agree that the non-peeers and poopers would become so incapacitated that they would have to cancel their telethon, and the movement (Ha! Movement! Get it?) would die out.
One might think that the death-deniers would have an equally hard time convincing anyone they're sane. I mean, death is all around us, yes? And no one who is dead for more than a minute or two comes back - ever. But no, these death-deniers are so clever (or the rest of us so dishwater dumb) that they keep on getting away with telling us that that child who just had his sleep (and life) interrupted by his bed burning up with him in it, ISN'T ACTUALLY DEAD. Huh? Hey abercrombie, the only thing left is an ashy skeleton! Death-deniers put any magician to shame, without even using misdirection. They invite you to look at the corpse...prod it, jolt it, slice it, fertilize it if you like, and they'll still convince some of us that that person did not die. Nope, never happened. Not dead, just gone. And now for my next trick...
So...
If we can't even get everyone to agree on breath/consumption/waste/death, how in the name of sanity are we going to get the world to agree that sharing is better than hoarding, talking is better than killing, and Star Trek is better than Star Wars?
Death-denial is not some inevitable facet of human nature. It's easy to think that it might be, again because we're so removed from the big picture. To some extent, the fear of death is probably natural...but death-denial could only thrive in an epoch of the most barbaric, degraded violence against others and ourselves, and that is precisely where humanity finds itself. The deprivation that the invention of private property begat, the violence that the advent of pastoral domestication begat, the crippling loss of free time that the advent of agriculture begat, the self-loathing superstitions and predations that these multitudes of miseries begat...humanity is in the middle of a perfect storm of species-wide disasters that happened far too slowly for anyone to notice or do anything about. And it will take another century or two before we've recovered our humanity enough for all of us to see the preposterousness of death-denial for what it is.
When i started writing this piece, i had a flash of bringing dazzling research to bear - death quotes, statistics, poetry...
But then i realized what a pathetic tap dance that would be - trying to impress you, or even myself. It would also be a disservice to reality, for just as nothing is more absolute than death, so too is almost nothing so unpredictable. When our day comes, we will face the end with only our naked self. So how could i make these words anything other than ME...naked words, naked thoughts, naked helplessness? Death will come, and we know not when...though that's actually one of the few realities that we ARE able to cheat (and escalating numbers choose to avail themselves). Here's an interesting angle on taking one's life - for some, it's perhaps the ultimate manifestation of "control issues". Aside from fear and selfishness, the anti-social need for control is one of the chief sicknesses of our time. And what more pure assertion of control, than choosing the moment and method of one's demise? For those who can't take that saner-than-you-think option, we trudge on knowing that we cannot know. When? Where? How?? If we're honest, we have to accept that even the healthiest, securest human is guaranteed...another minute or two at most. As you or i sit or stand at this very second, in less than one minute our life could be nothing but a memory (in someone else's crappy, barbarian brain).
All you're really guaranteed at any given moment are a few seconds.
Sweet dreams tonight, as you lie there with death's arms ready to enfold you...
And if we're truly willing to not bullshit ourselves, to stand in the light of what we KNOW, to strip away all the layers of vanity and conceit we spend a lifetime building, to be COMPLETELY NAKED with our biological truth, there is ZERO EVIDENCE that death is anything other than purest, absolutest nothing. We keep searching for some scientific evidence to the contrary...and every single hopeful hypothesis falls flat. Do you really think, with how insanely clever we are, that if there were any evidence, we wouldn't have found it already? Do you really think that?
But the greater the need for an escape mechanism, the less one cares about rationality. Anyone here not think that escaping reality is currently the number one human activity? And human arrogance, like fear, is at present almost immeasurably unbounded.
Of course our gods promise immortality.
Of COURSE they do.
How can we be sure that immortality dreams are the most tawdry wishful thinking ever thunked? Add up all the books written on the human "soul", then add up all the books written on the immortality of, say, grass. In that elusive big picture, there is zero biological difference between us and grass. Yet i'd venture to say there has never been a single book written on grass immortality.
Okay, maybe some cheeky, half-sane buddhist cranked one out.
But i'll be honest, dear friend, as you stare at your ceiling fan.
I'm afraid.
You're the one who's dying, and i'm afraid.
My chest tightens when i think about your death. Or my own.
Am i MORE afraid of death than all the deniers, because i reject the opiate of faith? Maybe. Maybe probably? I'm truly not sure. I don't want to be like all the mindless fools who spend a lifetime running. I want to live with my fear...wrap myself in it, feel the pure nothingness i will one day be, then see if i can come out the other side, still alive, but...
Less afraid? I'm not sure even i can overcome those walls of reality avoidance.
Can someone not dying truly understand what the dying know? Nor do i imagine they KNOW anything. My rational mind assures me there's no such thing as "near-death clarity". The only choices our culture leaves us then, are self-delusion, self-annihilation, or crapping-in-your-pants fear. If you've found a fourth, more comfortable option, you're smarter than the average bear.
Or perhaps just as smart as the average bear.
Is death-denial insane? Of course. And if you walk that path, you will find exactly what you seek.
Right up until the moment you die.
As i come to the end of this piece, the back of my mind searches for the perfect literary device with which to finish.
But no device can put death in its place.
There's only nothingness.
Is it here yet?
No? So go take your lucky self and be alive.
For a minute anyway.
Did i mention how much i love you?
"Soon" is relative, of course. Her heart keeps on beating, as all around falls apart. Dementia has addled her, but in her own way she's still lucid. She might keep going for a year or more...but you'd be hard-pressed to find a doctor who would bet a day's (or an hour's) salary on that. She's knocked on death's door several times already. She's been alive on this space rock for less than a century...
But not very much less.
And black nothingness is coming for her.
The pain and uselessness of her life are so acute that she talks longingly of wanting to die. As much as that thought frightens me, i want to believe her. Would i "assist" her, if the law allowed? I truly don't know. Once or twice in my life, i've brushed against intensities of pain (physical and emotional) such that i could imagine wanting to die...so maybe at a certain point, death acceptance becomes easy.
When i dig down really deeply though, a part of me thinks all that is just conceit. For her, for myself, for anyone. When she says she wants to die, a part of me wants to shout, "Liar liar pants on fire"! It's too easy to project my own fears, i know, and yet...isn't death the one thing that unites us all? No two lives are just the same, yet every single death is. It's a black wall unlike any other. The one truly incomparable experience.
Or non-experience? Language, like life, comes to a certain point and then fails.
A doctor once talked with her about longevity, and the part determination plays. As she entered her nineties, she spoke of her determination to not die. Yet now, i almost want to call her on possible bullshit. If, as she says, she has only wanted to die for the past year, WHY IS SHE STILL HERE? She believed in determination when it kept her alive, yet now that she's determined to die...nothing?
Unless of course her pants actually are on fire, and deep down she can't truly commit to the death wish.
I'll share these thoughts with her. She likes it when i bust her balls.
Like me, my friend harbors no fantasies about an "afterlife". In a serious essay for serious people, i'm embarrassed to even mention that word. It's such a pathetic, cringingly obvious fantasy. If death is the most inevitable feature of human existence, is death-denial a close second? Yet perhaps in our current culture of alienation, our natural fear of death is magnified. Perhaps in a functional, balanced society, where people unselfishly loved and cared for everyone else, even the greatest darkness of all might have much less sting. Who knows what kind of people we would be were we immersed in unconditional security and love every day of our lives?
But we aren't. We live here...in the ultimate culture of death-denial. Despite many conspicuous dissenters, deniers are unequivocally the majority. How does that affect our perception of death? Certainly it amplifies the fear, even for those doing all the denying. To invest so much energy into denying something in the face of all rational evidence, endows that reality a singular power in the conscious (or subconscious). Let's invoke a primal image, then. Let's imagine a pre-agricultural, pre-hunting human over forty thousand years ago. Imagine her or his first experience of the death of a loved one. Trembling hands reaching out to poke a corpse...yet imagine how much less frightening that moment would be if our ancestor lived in a culture of death-acceptance (as she or he very likely did)? If all their life they had been shown death openly, and encouraged not to fear it? Imagine if instead of haunted, disturbed eyes at the scene of every death, they had only seen contented acceptance? Grieving yes, but quickly overtaken by happy remembrances?
If you lived in that kind of world, imagine how much less death might sting.
I think most people don't have any kind of big-picture grasp of how staggeringly bizarre death-denial is. None of us have ever known any other reality, so the mind-blowing strangeness never crosses our mind. But let's think about it in contrast to the other most elemental human experiences. What are they? Only half of us (or less) give birth. Most of us (but not all) fuck. The only universals, then? We breathe, we consume, we make waste, and we die. Breath, consumption, waste, death.
Imagine that people started denying the inevitability of breath. What would happen? They would all die within a few minutes (and probably lose the deposit on the hall).
Imagine that people started denying the inevitability of consumption. The water deniers would be dead within two weeks. A handful of the food deniers might last another month.
Imagine that people started denying the inevitability of waste. I won't go into specifics, since i can't get a clear medical answer on whether it's possible to not-pee or not-poop yourself to death. But can we at least agree that the non-peeers and poopers would become so incapacitated that they would have to cancel their telethon, and the movement (Ha! Movement! Get it?) would die out.
One might think that the death-deniers would have an equally hard time convincing anyone they're sane. I mean, death is all around us, yes? And no one who is dead for more than a minute or two comes back - ever. But no, these death-deniers are so clever (or the rest of us so dishwater dumb) that they keep on getting away with telling us that that child who just had his sleep (and life) interrupted by his bed burning up with him in it, ISN'T ACTUALLY DEAD. Huh? Hey abercrombie, the only thing left is an ashy skeleton! Death-deniers put any magician to shame, without even using misdirection. They invite you to look at the corpse...prod it, jolt it, slice it, fertilize it if you like, and they'll still convince some of us that that person did not die. Nope, never happened. Not dead, just gone. And now for my next trick...
So...
If we can't even get everyone to agree on breath/consumption/waste/death, how in the name of sanity are we going to get the world to agree that sharing is better than hoarding, talking is better than killing, and Star Trek is better than Star Wars?
Death-denial is not some inevitable facet of human nature. It's easy to think that it might be, again because we're so removed from the big picture. To some extent, the fear of death is probably natural...but death-denial could only thrive in an epoch of the most barbaric, degraded violence against others and ourselves, and that is precisely where humanity finds itself. The deprivation that the invention of private property begat, the violence that the advent of pastoral domestication begat, the crippling loss of free time that the advent of agriculture begat, the self-loathing superstitions and predations that these multitudes of miseries begat...humanity is in the middle of a perfect storm of species-wide disasters that happened far too slowly for anyone to notice or do anything about. And it will take another century or two before we've recovered our humanity enough for all of us to see the preposterousness of death-denial for what it is.
When i started writing this piece, i had a flash of bringing dazzling research to bear - death quotes, statistics, poetry...
But then i realized what a pathetic tap dance that would be - trying to impress you, or even myself. It would also be a disservice to reality, for just as nothing is more absolute than death, so too is almost nothing so unpredictable. When our day comes, we will face the end with only our naked self. So how could i make these words anything other than ME...naked words, naked thoughts, naked helplessness? Death will come, and we know not when...though that's actually one of the few realities that we ARE able to cheat (and escalating numbers choose to avail themselves). Here's an interesting angle on taking one's life - for some, it's perhaps the ultimate manifestation of "control issues". Aside from fear and selfishness, the anti-social need for control is one of the chief sicknesses of our time. And what more pure assertion of control, than choosing the moment and method of one's demise? For those who can't take that saner-than-you-think option, we trudge on knowing that we cannot know. When? Where? How?? If we're honest, we have to accept that even the healthiest, securest human is guaranteed...another minute or two at most. As you or i sit or stand at this very second, in less than one minute our life could be nothing but a memory (in someone else's crappy, barbarian brain).
All you're really guaranteed at any given moment are a few seconds.
Sweet dreams tonight, as you lie there with death's arms ready to enfold you...
And if we're truly willing to not bullshit ourselves, to stand in the light of what we KNOW, to strip away all the layers of vanity and conceit we spend a lifetime building, to be COMPLETELY NAKED with our biological truth, there is ZERO EVIDENCE that death is anything other than purest, absolutest nothing. We keep searching for some scientific evidence to the contrary...and every single hopeful hypothesis falls flat. Do you really think, with how insanely clever we are, that if there were any evidence, we wouldn't have found it already? Do you really think that?
But the greater the need for an escape mechanism, the less one cares about rationality. Anyone here not think that escaping reality is currently the number one human activity? And human arrogance, like fear, is at present almost immeasurably unbounded.
Of course our gods promise immortality.
Of COURSE they do.
How can we be sure that immortality dreams are the most tawdry wishful thinking ever thunked? Add up all the books written on the human "soul", then add up all the books written on the immortality of, say, grass. In that elusive big picture, there is zero biological difference between us and grass. Yet i'd venture to say there has never been a single book written on grass immortality.
Okay, maybe some cheeky, half-sane buddhist cranked one out.
But i'll be honest, dear friend, as you stare at your ceiling fan.
I'm afraid.
You're the one who's dying, and i'm afraid.
My chest tightens when i think about your death. Or my own.
Am i MORE afraid of death than all the deniers, because i reject the opiate of faith? Maybe. Maybe probably? I'm truly not sure. I don't want to be like all the mindless fools who spend a lifetime running. I want to live with my fear...wrap myself in it, feel the pure nothingness i will one day be, then see if i can come out the other side, still alive, but...
Less afraid? I'm not sure even i can overcome those walls of reality avoidance.
Can someone not dying truly understand what the dying know? Nor do i imagine they KNOW anything. My rational mind assures me there's no such thing as "near-death clarity". The only choices our culture leaves us then, are self-delusion, self-annihilation, or crapping-in-your-pants fear. If you've found a fourth, more comfortable option, you're smarter than the average bear.
Or perhaps just as smart as the average bear.
Is death-denial insane? Of course. And if you walk that path, you will find exactly what you seek.
Right up until the moment you die.
As i come to the end of this piece, the back of my mind searches for the perfect literary device with which to finish.
But no device can put death in its place.
There's only nothingness.
Is it here yet?
No? So go take your lucky self and be alive.
For a minute anyway.
Did i mention how much i love you?
Friday, March 1, 2019
"The Cool, Cool River" (live Central Park)
S.T.H.O.L.T.B.I.D.
(songs to hear one last time before i die)
-by paul simon
It hypnotizes, detours into temporary oases, then tightens and pulls your heart out of your chest as it lifts into eternity, the brass becoming the pulsing of your blood...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UioE0ljc9o
(songs to hear one last time before i die)
-by paul simon
It hypnotizes, detours into temporary oases, then tightens and pulls your heart out of your chest as it lifts into eternity, the brass becoming the pulsing of your blood...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UioE0ljc9o
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