Death

I don’t want to, but I must - like using a capital “I” for the first person singular subjective personal pronoun in this essay rather than my preferred lower case “i” - death is incontrovertible; there, I’ve spoken truth to power. Stick a fork in me, I’m done. Wasn’t that fun?

Sadly it is just that simple and yet here we are 2,000 plus years since the death of Christ and still murdering each other in the vain hope of helping the victim to heaven. Were it that simple we would not have allowed our collective existence to be hijacked by a bunch of mercantile pimps selling the promise of afterlife camouflaged as deodorant, or gratitude disguised as Mother’s Day flowers. I can remember lying awake as an 8 year old trying to understand what it means to die, possibly precipitated by the death of a new pet rat that got its head stuck in the mesh of its cage and pulled itself apart, but more likely reaction formation to the dawning realization that the family I was born to and idealized, had no concept of unconditional love and I could not reconcile myself to their growing list of conditions; so like any 8 year old with the power of the universe at his disposal, sort of, I imagined my family into an all-loving fable as seen on TV and substituted the vague outlines of the incomprehensible - death - as the immediate cause of my growing existential “angst” ( good word - look it up ). From this resistance to the reality of character formation and the pressures of socialization, I threw my puny intellect up against eternity and the limits of infinity - got nowhere, but it felt better than looking at brothers and sisters embarrassed by my crossed eyes.

Yes you’d be right, he not only looks funny - he won’t shut up. It is still not clear what they are more embarrassed by, my presence or my tongue, i d k? I do know, I still have difficulty reconciling my love for them against their “terms of endearment,” and I still aver from applying the apt expression Leonard Cohen coined - “bitter searching of the heart” because I suspect that might lead to love, growth, maybe even acceptance; then what would I have to grouse about? Unfortunately after this much time, I am more enamored of the consequence of death than any mysterious key which might unlock access to the mythical loving hearth of yore. Death, however is certain - I know because my rat beheaded itself in pursuit of its own liberty which only serves to prove my childhood rat was a better patriot than that large percentage of non-voting U.S. citizens reclining in their impotence rather than face the uphill task of dethroning the “paper tigers” who have overthrown our hallowed halls of liberty - very much like that 8 year old me afraid to change so-called objectionable aspects of my being for fear of finding out nothing would inspire love from the unloving. Like every briar patch, there is a silver-lining, for I have cultivated a lifelong fascination for the inexorable end of life. In case you’re reading in search of eternal truth, sorry to say I’m no closer to an understanding of death, but like an old pair of tennis shoes, if you keep something around long enough eventually it will become, if not comfortable, at least irritatingly familiar.

So too with death, but this is where our “gamer” culture and I part company. Today’s ruling class has staked its existence on a demonstrated ability to keep us at each other’s throat - politically, religiously, ethnically .  . . etc., For me, while death has certainly not subsided in its fascination over the years, rather than the familiarity of a cranky relative for whom one must attenuate one’s attention in order to maintain perspective, and or dignity - death strikes me more as a beautiful paramour who commands one’s attention regardless of proximity or time. Nor by this disclosure, am I lending credence to any mullah’s fictional depiction of 70 virgins waiting on the other side of a suicidal jihad; besides what good could come from chasing death, anymore than what might be accomplished by attempting to, as Arundhati Roy has suggested “pursue beauty to her lair;” clearly I have anthropomorphized Ms Roy’s far more courageous and sublime metaphor in service of my own narrow gender idealization - I’m a man; what can I say. Michel Montaigne said about death - to paraphrase “what an expert it is, for it has been doing what it does much longer than our lifespan allows us to conceive; therefore picture the expertise it must have at what it does; relax and enjoy the ride.” Unfortunately logic, death and humans never seem to agree and so some 500 years after Mssr Montaigne’s generous efforts, John Q Public is still being sold a “pig in poke” and still trotting off to war with a promise of protecting somebody from something as long as death is allowed to validate the ticket. The sad truth is even if I was to track down the dirty dog selling the “pig in poke” theory and slit the throat of said dirty dog - some other dirty dog would step in and continue selling “pigs in pokes,” because, I guess, John Q Public has a genetic appetite for “pigs in pokes.”

Unfortunately for the species, the stakes have risen to where the haters are not content with organized war to winnow the unsightly excess of what Paul Cezanne described as we “bipeds.” Today the bored-to-tears, never-worked-a-day-in-their-lives ruling class has gambled life as we know it against a hubris born of psychotic upbringings rendering compassion for anything other than opulence a chimera to be caged and eviscerated for whatever profit can be sucked out of its marrow. To those of leadership defined by wealth, we are fodder for the economic cannons of the long discredited and ever new “infinite growth paradigm.” Never mind that by the digital barons' very own computer models we now sit at the precipice of the 6th major extinction with the human population square in the cross hairs of a technology run amuck. The ability of marketing mavens to create euphemisms such as “information super highway;” “war on terror;” or my personal favorite “clean and sober” is so great that while ad men for monsatan are drinking glyphosate in front of school children, the marketing shills now describe our salvation in an evolutionary event being propagated as “the singularity.” This coming deliverance, not unlike the movie, will bend over our kind like the newly coronated TPP is bending over the ghosts of Mom and Pop stores echoed from an America even up until fairly recently - which for me as an old man has a much different meaning than some homie in Hollywood looking to make his bones throwing up on the Hollenbeck Station - ironically even that effete act of rebellion is diluted by the cancer his momma is dying from - a disease she got picking strawberries in a glyphosate inundated field in Garden Grove when he was just a baby - but that homie or homette will never learn this fact because the haters have convinced an entire generation that learning is black magic of “whitey.”

. . and still death keeps on coming and coming like some sex addict looking to get out from under in a zen retreat sponsored by Hare Krishna - meaning no disrespect to the sacred. There has to be some reason we continue to write, to draw, to sing; unless death is more like I have conceived her - a beautiful woman who must be serenaded and we being too much like Cyrano De Bergerac are ashamed of our big noses, or like me with my crossed eyes, must dress up our fear of her rejection (or embrace depending on your particular neurosis) with creative offerings, similar to how I convinced myself as a child, “if only I was .  .  . then they would love me”, or for the purposes of this essay death in her insatiable hunger might become so distracted by our myopic efforts to separate ourselves from the inevitable cycles of growth, decay and demise within this physical realm we inhabit that we could somehow become exempt. Perhaps the spirit of desire in itself is enough to staunch that hemorrhaging of our life force spilling into the world’s battlefields; or depleting our former human capacity for excellence on the charnel floor of the newest mall built, itself upon the carcass of a dead neighborhood rich with recent human history having been sacrificed for a parking structure in which to house conveyances that burn the life blood of dinosaurs from our planet’s last “great extinction.” Nothing will stop death, not religion, not money, not love; if there is no way out, then I choose to go with love in my heart, for I have yet to discover a more consistent feeling of wellbeing and accomplishment than to love that which cannot be loved, even death.

Dedicated to the future of my species from planet earth; 3 July 2015