« The Forest Forty | Main | Ethan Allen, of the war, not furniture »

life, death and and comic books

life, death and and comic books

Did you ever think about how you are going to die? We all think about death sometimes. It's an inevitable part of life. We will all die someday. I'm not afraid of that. It's the how that scares me. A prolonged illness? A fiery crash? A bizarre accident that will make the headlines at Ananova?

I only think about these things once in a while, usually while I am lying in bed at night, wide awake and watching the clock slowly turn from one number to the next. Something about the darkness and the seemingly endless stretch of darkness in between my days that causes me to face my mortality. Sometimes I give up thinking about the how and dwell on the when. Most people who think about these things on a regular basis are those who live their life to the fullest. They want to live every day as if it is their last, and they don't waste a minute of their time being unproductive.

Me? I may get morose and scared in the middle of the night and think about what I haven't done and the days I have wasted, but once I wake up and I realize it is Saturday, I have no qualms about spending the day in my pajamas, reading and playing video games and doing nothing productive at all. The morning light tends to strip me of any thoughts I had during the night of making meaning out of my day. Once the caffeine settles in and the computer is turned on, I go back to being that person who wants to spend her days in a comfortable lull.

Somehow, an obituary reading "she died in her pajamas at 4 in the afternoon on a Saturday, sprawled out on the couch surrounded by comic books and empty coffee cups" does not sound too bad to me.

I try not to think about death too much, because it gives me a bad case of sorrow to think of leaving my kids behind in grief. But I have finally come to that point in my life where, if I were to die today, I think I would have fulfilled my quota of doing good things and living a a good life. No regrets, no what ifs, because I learned to banish those what ifs a long time ago. Useless little creatures, they are. I have totally lived my life to the fullest the past few years. I like my life, I like what I have done with it, I like what I have made of it so far.

Sometimes thinking about death leads you to thinking about life. And instead of rushing out to do all those things that I haven't done (and really, I think visiting Egypt and becoming a rock star are out of the question at this point), I am just going to revel in the life I have made for myself to this point.

Comments

"I only think about these things once in a while, usually while I am lying in bed at night, wide awake and watching the clock slowly turn from one number to the next. "

And of course you know which part I read wrong, which lead me to wonder exactly what you and Justin get up to in bed if that's what yr thinking, and then I thought - woah, what a skill, to be able to tell the time with a ...clock.

G, I love you.

Worse than being found dead surrounded by comic books would be the obituary issue of A Small Victory (for mature readers, warning contains language)

Opens on a nine-box series of close-ups showing the various detritus of the living room... cigarette butts, coffee cups... the signs are ominous and spell out the doom of the next two-page spread...

Michele! Spread out on the couch! One arm dangling down onto the carpet, the other trapped beneath the cushions. She died looking for spare change and starved to death because she couldn't free her hand from between the cushions.

A series of pages recounting the final moments... the PS2 CPU burns out, the last Krispy Kreme is eaten, the kids have all gone to stay with their best friends. Even Justin is out of town for some unfathomable reason...

Like the girl in Stephen King's "Gerald's Game" she begins to hallucinate. Filler Bunny becomes her spiritual animal guide, reasoning with her to gnaw her hand off at the wrist. She gives in to temptation and chews off her own hand. As blood-loss becomes an issue and the satisfaction of digesting her own hand settles in, Filler Bunny points out that perhaps she'd have been better off chewing through the wrist that was trapped in the couch instead of the free one. At this point Michele passes out and the guest artist takes over depicting a three page surrealist nightmare of the insides of her head.

Dali meets Escher as they beat the living crap out of Giger and McKean in a tagteam of graphical proportions. And there in the middle of it all is a seven year old Michele clicking her heels together in her ruby slippers...

Feverish and crazed with hunger she wakes up again, still trapped on the couch, the bloody stump of her missing hand has been cauterized with lit cigarettes and she sucks the moisture left in the filters to satisfy the raw thirst in her throat.

The final page, we track backwards through another nine panels, moving up away from the doomed Michele and as we spot Filler Bunny dancing on the top of thr couch she reaches up and wails towards the reader...

The End.

I might disagree with you on a small point. I am morbid....and have been morbid, paranoid, and a hypochondriac for almost my whole life. And maybe I do get overly excited at the smallest things about life, but death scares the crap out of me. More since I lost that feeling of immortality--which I had more or less until I was seventeen. At seventeen, I had a rather nasty freak accident, and people kept commenting how lucky I was (no cars coming by to smash me flat as I lay on a dark, and heavily travelled road wearing dark clothing, leg broken, unable to move) and from that point on, my natural curiosity about death slowly began to metamorph into something into something that scared me beyond all belief. And my depressive swings started getting worse and worse, until I started worrying that if I got too happy that would be the moment the universe would decide to wax me. I've been sorta battling my way back from that....and battling all the rest of my silly irrational fears at the same time. But it's still been my experience that the people who don't constantly wonder when they are going to die or how....live happier. The first time I flew a plane, I was so excited and I never thought it might crash. Now....with another flight coming up in a week, I'm probably going to spend half the flight chewing Tums. Unless I make a concious effort not to be freaked out or worry about dying. I kinda wish I had somebody to fly with....I'm not so big on the flying alone thing.

See post later on for my book store loot.

D - I think you need to bring your blog back. You have way too much time on you hands. Good story, though.

Pixel - I was obsessed for a long time - from about age 10 - thinking about how I was going to die. I spent the whole day today thinking that I jinxed myself and I would die before I got home from shopping. Thinking about it doesn't keep me from being happy, but maybe it does keep me from being happy for extended periods of time.

The scientists, not the philosophers, now address most effectively the great questions of existence, the mind, and the meaning of the human condition. by poker tournaments