Death

image stolen from raymears.com

Maybe I’ll go outside and write in the park. But I’ll run into the neighbors, who’ll want to have their dog out. The dog who murdered Bud. I’ll have to look at the weird rich hippie woman’s face, his weird rich hippie face, their smug dad’s money organic beets lifestyle. Their stupid kid. I’ll have to look at them and then just come back in and sharpen my axe. Picture laying it right through their pit bull’s spine. Its startled look, dragging itself home on its front legs bleeding out.

I want to kill my neighbors’ dog. And their kid, and them, in that order.

Yesterday I thought about C. I was walking past some cork trees, or holly trees- I have no idea what the fuck they are. That’s why I was thinking about her. Walking through the public garden, some purple plant like rhubarb but with a tall stem, many leaves. She’d have told me what it is, how it grew and flowered. Actually it’s all one organism joined at the roots, she’d have said. It’s thirty thousand years old. It’s only pollinated by the Western rufous hummingbird, once per century. She was a botanical expert. She knew things and thought things. She was funny. Now she’s fucking dead. My dad is dead. My cat is dead. Impossible to mourn any one of them. They all get lumped together. Mixed with different feelings like my urge to lop off the pit’s back legs because it killed my cat. My urge to do it in front of their kid. Cause as much psychological harm as possible. If I pull it off right I could destroy generations.

Jesus Christ everybody’s dead and what’s left. My mom’s still alive. I should go see her this weekend. But I want pussy or I want to hole up in my sweaty apartment and write all day. I imagine C living inside my mind, reading over my shoulder. I reread the piece about her. It’s too short; there’s really nothing to it, but she would have laughed. All I wanted.

I read about a famous guy’s wife dying. I saw him at the gym once. Now I have this fantasy, I see him again. Give him advice. It sucks and you’ll never get over it, I’ll say. He says thanks for the heads up.

The experience of having someone die is acutely awful, I tell him. Then they continue to be dead after you’ve got through the acute grief like being set on fire. They continue to be dead and it’s chronically awful and it lasts forever, I’d explain. She’s never coming back. You may get briefly distracted from the unending fact of her death as other people you love also die. Or perhaps you yourself get sick and suffer ahead of dying. I’ve been through this. I have insights.

Here’s what’s inevitable. Everyone you love dying, and in many cases you living long enough to watch. Moments of burning agony punctuate long years of working for nothing. Here’s what’s impossible: falling in love. Finding a million dollars in the street. Creating something of lasting meaning. Horrible things: absolutely unavoidable. Joyful things: unbelievably difficult. They might come if you work extremely hard and have incredible luck. Might. But no matter what you’ll watch the people you love die and then die yourself. God is real; he’s a giant Eldritch alien mouth whose food is your suffering. Or he’s simply a blind twitching galaxy-sized beast from beyond the void who has no capacity to care. In any case H.P. Lovecraft was right. But hang in there man.