What Kills Me Keeps Me Alive
One of infinite contradictions animating my dumbass.
Smoking, I’m told, brought me to a heart attack not long ago. I believe it. There is no cause to deny it. The evidence aligns. More importantly, I’m a pessimist. I know this world is the best it can be and a beloved hobby murdering me sounds about right.
The things I love will kill me in the end. If the people I love don’t get me first.
I’ve been fighting with my wife about stupid things. Little stuff. Inconsequential trifles of no concern, like doing everything myself nearly killed me alongside my beloved cigarettes. It was all tolerable before giving them up. Cigarettes, not my wife.
Since I quit smoking, not-quite-optimal stuff bothers me way more than it did in the past. Or maybe it does because I couldn’t even die right. Who knows? These threads are tied up together in a torment tapestry due to both happening at the same time.
But I suspect I’m upset the job was left half done. If you’re going to kill someone, finish the damned job. It’s cruelty otherwise. For the record, I’m not sure if I’m talking to my wife, myself, or R.J. Reynolds.
Still, I’ve been angry for a while now. At whatever. When I was in the hospital for some minor organ failure, I was promised a lot. I ignored half of it, since making promises you won’t or can’t keep from a hospital bedside is just polite.
But I did believe the other half of the barrage of promises. They haven’t really shown up just yet. I’m told they are in progress. I think it's great they’re in motion. Movement is life. Immobility is death in addition to being boring.
Rocks are just objects unless animated with motion or incinerated in a crack pipe. A rock flying at your face or into your lungs isn’t an object, it is a clear and present danger. I miss that kind of thing. I’ve been immobile for too long, trying to retain life at the cost of everything else and it is destroying me.
The last two months have been the most miserable of my adult life. I mentioned this to my wife and she said nothing. Maybe she thought I was riffing about essentialism or something again. I don’t blame her. I’ve been bored with me for decades already, so I know it takes some getting used to.
Still, you people seem mildly interested, which is why I'm assaulting you with it. With myself, not essentialism.
I’ve been thinking dying would have been easier on everyone. I don’t think there’s a hell but what we make here on earth. The afterlife seems a lie to me. Well, a delusion. I don’t know if people can lie about it if they’ve never seen it and no one alive has ever seen it. It’s an unanswerable question for the living to suffer and a secret for the dead to keep.
I have to shuffle off this mortal coil to find out if hell is a real, eternal punishment for those audacious enough to utilize the cognitive gifts our creator cursed us with. Or if it’s just lights out and a return to the oblivion I experienced prior to my birth. The way I see it and how it is Son of Mansplained to me, it is one or the other.
This represents a dilemma in the human condition but isn’t terribly profound outside the idea there is no hurry to solve it. I don’t want to die. But I don’t fear death, either. I don’t believe a free man can. It keeps us from living and enjoying a life. Fear sucks and is the gods damned enemy of everything that is good.
If you want some historical reference to see what collective cowardice looks like, 2020 isn’t going anywhere. It will always be there when you’re ready and will always have been dominated by craven cunts at all levels of civilization and society. It was not a great time. I am also suffering a not-great time.
The most alive I have ever felt was atop a freight train speeding across a bridge over open space. I leapt from car to car with nothing but hungry death below and a night sky filled with fireworks. I wrote about it in my travel memoir if you want more.
The point is, I don’t fear death. I don’t know if I ever have. I don’t fear life, either. I fear I could waste one. That I could spend my life chasing trivial things, mourning my life rather than getting busy living even if it means dying. This sounds suicidal but isn’t.
You’re just going to have to trust me on that.
I want to smoke so I can handle things again. But I also I want to return to hopping trains. To freedom. Maybe I could write about it. It seems more interesting than essentialism dominating modern politics. Both are likely to kill me, anyway. But trains are more exciting and when I smoked I could do anything.
At least I’d be alive, in motion, and no train ever broke a promise. Every clack of the track is another moment spent celebrating a life of movement. Another promise of death in return for something real. The kind of thing it takes to feel alive.
But not yet. I'll see how I feel tomorrow. The world may already be as good as it can get, but I'm pretty sure I can always get better.
mildly interesting but mostly self-flagellation. nicotine and such will do that to person. you do have the option of creating your own universe here on this piece of time and maybe space. new distrations may be of some relief, but your brains too smart for that. keep hacking at it brother.