Tagged: death

May 2, 2012

Why I Dwell on Death in Times of Stress and Why You Should Do It Too!

a very old picture of a skeleton seated on a chair as if relaxing

Yesterday I had a headache, and as I was walking down the hall rubbing my temples, a random guy said “Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon.” So of course, I said “Yeah, eventually I’ll die,” and he was like “Oh, don’t be like that.” Which totally surprised me, because isn’t that what he was talking about in the first place? Whatever.

I remember one time, I was crying (literally sobbing) on the phone to my sponsor about some fool thing I’ve since forgotten, and she stopped me mid-blub with one simple phrase. “Well, eventually you’ll die.” You know I shut right the fuck up? Suddenly my stupid problem and my entire life came into rack focus. How could this shit matter when DEATH IS COMING?

How many years does the average human really have? Life expectancy in the US is 78.4 years. Add a couple for being a woman, college educated, and half white, lose a couple for being half Mexican, being fat, eating red meat, and living in Los Angeles and my personal life expectancy is roughly 78.4 years. I’m 27.4 years old now, so I’ve got 51 years left. Accounting for end of life sickness and frailty, and the fact that we spend 8 out of every 24 hours asleep, I only have 27 more conscious years. And that’s just if nothing goes wrong. Based on past experience, shit will ALWAYS go wrong.

So why am I wasting my precious little living time on petty fucking bullshit I won’t remember a week from now? No reason! Acknowledging my own mortality really keeps things in perspective. In 100 years will anyone remember me, let alone who made the first pot of coffee at the office every morning for a week? No. I’ll be forgotten, as I should be. No one should carry the burden of remembering my boring life when they have their own to live. And no one should carry the burden of petty day to day problems when we only have a few precious decades to eat and fuck and play and love and learn and be awesome. Everybody, think of death, feel it’s icy indifferent breath on your neck and remember: it’s coming. For you. Live your life while you can!

June 24, 2011

The Wolf

One of the worst things about having had a bad childhood (please see well written examples here, here and here) has nothing to do with the bad childhood itself. It’s the way its effects seem to linger. Sometimes my tendency towards chaos can feel like a wolf at my back. In times like this, all the energy I usually spend on being polite and getting along with others goes to keep myself from acting up. It can be exhausting.

I’m coming out of one of these episodes right now, and although I feel emotionally better every day, my body is still exhausted from all the extra work I’ve been doing to keep my head in the game. This evening after work, I came home and wrote this. I rarely share poetry on my blog because I rarely think it’s any good. And this might not be any good either, but it’s such an accurate description of what goes on in my head sometimes that I feel like I have to put it up.

The wolf, my mother who I curled up inside of
The wolf, my savior who fights for me still
This wolf in my heart who tears at my stomach,
Who cries like a widow for what she has lost

The wolf is my sister, is who I belong to
And I am the thief, run off in the night
Wolf, let me have this one piece of surrender
You know I’ll be yours when my running has stopped

You tasted my blood because that’s what I fed you
You’ll have all you want at the end of my years
Wolf, I have run through this field of wildflowers
Wolf, I have run through the days of my youth

Why do you chase me?
You know you will have me
Why do you chase me?
I’m already yours

The wolf my creator, my impatient master
My birth is her birth and my death is her cause

To any who love me, the wolf came before you
Know that I ran for as long as I could

I made the wolf and I put her inside me
I cried to her heart and she sheltered me there
She fed me her strength and I her on my anger

The wolf my creator is also my child

I fled from her need and I tore down her shelter
I took what she gave and I left her to die

Wolf, I am sorry I tried to deny you
You were a means to a much better end

Someday I’ll stop, and someday you will find me
And you’ll have the debt that I owed all these years

I have run far in the time since I left you
I have changed faces and colors and skins

One day you’ll have me, but no one will know you

From what I have told them, they will not believe
You are the victim and I am the fraud

What they will think when you finally catch me
Is I am the hero and you are the thief.

June 21, 2011

Taking a Job on the Death Star

I never knew who Ryan Dunn was until this morning, and I never ever cared. I still don’t really care. Don’t get me wrong, I have many drunken friends who regularly put things in their assholes that I would be extremely sad to lose. It’s only inconsequential to me because I wasn’t acquainted with this one.

Drunk driving seems to be it’s own reward, and I have to say that when I heard that he had been drinking and that he had only killed himself and his passenger, my first reaction was to be grateful to that tree for taking the hit that may well have killed or maimed someone entirely unacquainted with Dunn and who had no suspicion of the huge mistake they were about to be embroiled in.

I feel for the passenger, as I always do in cases where someone else’s mistake ends up murdering their friend. But really, unless the man was unconscious when he was folded into Dunn’s Porsche, he had every opportunity to choose a safer transport.

In situations like this I tend to remember the scene in “Clerks” where Dante and Randall are discussing the contractors that must have died in the rebel attack on the 2nd Death Star. Randall bemoans the tragedy of the plumbers and engineers who were murdered by the rebels, “casualties of a war they had nothing to do with.” But a roofer happens by and explains that personal politics can play heavily on a contractors decision to take a job or leave it. He explains how he passed on a roofing gig for a gangster, based on his feelings about the employer. As it happens, the contractor that took the job was shot in an attempted hit. The moral of the story is: be aware of the risk involved.

Every time I hear about someone dying because of their idiot friend, I feel a lot worse for them than I feel for the people who die by their own hand, like drunk driving Ryan Dunn. The true innocent would have been the station wagon he broadsided if he hadn’t hit that tree, the children who’s parent would never have arrived home. Instead, he killed himself and his friend, who took the wrong job, who hung out with the wrong guy and who got in the car with a drunk despite the risk involved.

Is it sad that someone died? Yeah, but people die every day and we never hear about it, we don’t care about them because they lived relatively quiet lives, and none of us even knew who they were. I remember when I was very young, after my great aunt died from pancreatic cancer, I was walking around my school thinking “don’t you know that someone has DIED?!” They didn’t. The truth is that I wasn’t even that close with her, it just seemed like there should be some kind of reaction to the loss of a life, no matter how remote. But there’s no way the world could function if every death was televised.

August 17, 2009

Choose Your Blog Adventure: Mob Style

So I put the call out on twitter, asking for some blog suggestions. Here’s how it went:

Marinaisgo: About to write a blog. What should I write about? I’ve been thinking about money, punk rock, and sex lately.

Bebe33:@Marinaisgo I like hearing about money.
Moopigpoo: @Marinaisgo I like hearing about sex.

Jaynatopia: @Marinaisgo sounds like the start of a novel
Marinaisgo: @Jaynatopia I only wish I had some sort of narrative
Jaynatopia@Marinaisgo it starts out with a sex symbol punk rocker breaking into the mob’s bank vault; now run with it!

Your wish is my command.

I’m a punk rocker, I’m sure that someone thinks I’m a sex symbol (that poor dumb bastard-thanks though,) and I often think about breaking into bank vaults, but probably only because I know I’m not supposed to. Does the Mob have it’s own bank vault? I can just see that meeting with the executives at CitiBank:

Don Vito: I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse.
Citibank: And what’s that, Don?
Don Vito: Please, call me Vito, all my friends do.
Citibank: Ok Vito, what is your offer?
Don Vito: Citibank, my friend. I’m gonna let you build a whole other vault next to the one you already got just to keep my family money inside of. How’s that sound to you my friend?
Citibank: You’re joking, right?
Don Vito: No. Why?
Citibank: You want me to use bank funds to build another vault next to our existing vault so that we can keep your family’s money in it, which will only make us the most at risk bank in the city, possibly the nation?
Don Vito: I don’t see the problem here.
Citibank: I do. Not only will every rival hood in the…
Don Vito: Woah, who said anything about hoods? We’re a family. That’s a racist misconception of Italian descended individuals.
Citibank: Than why do you need a whole other vault to put your money in?
Don Vito: I’m sorry?
Citibank: Why would you need a whole other vault to keep your families money in, unless for illegal activities Mr. Vito…
Don’t Vito: Call me Don, please.
Citibank: Don, here at Citibank, we’re no strangers to handling large fortunes. Our most famous client, Mr. Stephen Baldwin, of the Hollywood Baldwins, has no qualms about letting his substantial fortune mix with the smaller checking and savings accounts of others.
Don Vito: Where does Alec keep his money?
Citibank: What?
Don Vito: Are you going to build my family a vault or not?
Citibank: I’m sorry. We don’t do that here at Citibank. Besides, it looks like you have a bankruptcy on your account.
Don Vito: I see how it is. I thought you might say that, which is too bad for you. Come on boys, we’re going to Bank of America, where they understand us.

Of course it would never happen like that. Citibank is just dying to get into bed with the mob. They would do anything to drop that fuck Stephen Baldwin. I heard he overdraws every single pay period. You should have stayed in Threesome, Stephen Baldwin. It’s a cruel, hard world out here. Even at Citibank. ALLEGEDLY.

What am I forgetting here. Oh yeah, the sex.

Well, I can tell you that Don Vito is destined to die whilst fucking his mistress, an unpopular girl who went to his daughter’s high school. She spent 3 years after graduation as a low-rent stripper in the ghetto, scrimping and tricking before she could afford to buy herself breast implants, and get hired at the good club, where she met Don Vito, and through a steady habit of refusing to give him a hand-job in the back room (mostly because he was gross), she became his angel and he set her up in a fancy 1 bedroom in a complex with a gym in the basement and a pool on the roof.

One night, while he’s huffing and puffing above her, chin sweat dangerously close to dripping into her grimacing mouth, while she moans “oh donnie, donnie, you’re drivin’ me crazy,” in an almost hypnotic manner, and tries not to remember her step-father who did the same thing every Wednesday night until he died while driving home drunk, Don Vitos’ heart gives out.

They found her three days later, when a neighbor complained about the smell. Doctor’s report that she tried to satiate her initial thirst by licking the sweat from the folds of his fat, where it had pooled as his body cooled and bloated on top of her. But in the end, she had been her own worst enemy, her prized breast implants had ruptured on impact of the old man’s body. Had it not been for the silicone leaking into her blood stream, she could have survived, licking sweat off the corpse of her dead Mafia don boyfriend while she waited for help to arrive.

Of course, if it weren’t for the breast implants she’s still be giving $20 blow jobs in the alley behind ‘Big Jims Booby Barn’ on interstate 58. So there you go.

March 22, 2008

Furniture Woman

I think that I will be the kind of old person that surrounds myself with my furniture. My bedroom furniture will be huge, and I will probably be small, like my own grandmother is today. I might buy a platform bed so that my children won?t have to throw away the box spring when I die. Or maybe I?ll have a box spring bed, so that they will. Part of me wants the cleaning and dismantling of my house to be long and difficult and heavy.

My dining room furniture will be massive, more so than the bedroom set. I refuse to own a lonely coffee table; I will buy my coffee tables by the truckloads and stack them in empty rooms along with extra dining tables, extra beds, extra sofas and exactly thirteen metal bed frames. Contemporary bedroom furniture is far too thin and easily transported. My children will suffer as I suffered.

I want them to painstakingly cart away each bed, each dining room set. I want them to take them to their individual homes, and keep them until their children will cart it to their homes. Centuries from now, across humanities viral sprawl I want for my furniture to live on without me. I want to have so many couches, so many coffee tables that surely, surely at the end of time, the last thing left will be something I loved, something I breathed on and left to my children. Something they took when there was nothing else left.