The Dirt Nap

Today is my birthday. I got the coolest wallet. Fidelo. Two plates of elegantly anodized steel.  Magnetic with an understated strap and get this, three extra straps because they figured out that was the moving part.  I’m 54, it could be my last wallet.  Unscannable.  Holds all my cards with strips, chips and numbers.

Really fucking cool.

Brunch this Sunday for the rest of my presents and bloody tomato juice cocktail artistry.

A dead bird, all scrawny and bald and about the the size of my stretched out thumb has been lying on the sidewalk just outside my office door for the last few days. I go out for a smoke. It gives me a melancholy that I don’t know what to do with.

A tiny carcass with a skinny neck stretched over the border of a would be flower bed. Alive for less than a week I’m sure. Never had a chance. The family built a nest in the blunt but leafy tree exactly where the door swings open to the right.

Next door is a crematorium. Families weeping. Weird station wagons and vans pulling in and out. The cloying sweet smell emanating from it blends with the skunky and salty smell of the two pot clinics from just a few doors down to make for a bouquet I’m sure no amount of explaining could make you understand.

Weirdest goddamn smell ever.

I imagine death as poking my finger into the semi-permeable membrane of infinity.  A poster for some science fiction horror movie.  A slurp or a drip and I’m gone at the end of the movie trailer. Or maybe after a protracted disease or getting ripped apart by a goddamn bus or a bear in some gory and horrifying instant.

I don’t fucking know.

What rattles my cage is not knowing whether anything else happens or not.

Obviously I’m not religious.

My cat just died and I imagine her a tiny ripple in the fabric of a universe with exploding suns and gigantic black holes everywhere.  My favorite high school teacher passed not long ago and I picture his ripple as not much more.  He was fucking awesome and so was my cat.

My ripple will be similarly occasional.

And I’m famous.

You can tell how long a cat has on this planet by watching it groom.  Exactly how vigorous and how thorough informs its lifespan and all the compass points between. I watched her die.

If only death were dreaming.

I’m driving  a giant land ship across vast plains under immense power to battle evil carnivals destroying towns for no reason but spectacle. Towering buildings that reach space with women in elevators that would seduce or kill me.  I am confused about some clicking and spitting beetle that keeps attacking me. A vicious dog rendered helpless in a freezing above ground pool. Planks and plywood that my feet and legs keep slipping through as I walk over the top of it. Hanging out with strangers who morph into celebrities and dead friends that whisper wisdom that makes no sense once I wake up but leaving me with a lingering sense of awe and deep affection.

Death should be me trying to remember my dream a few minutes into my shower because I don’t realize I’m dead. That would be perfect. My dead cat just crossed the floor from the corner of my mind.

We’re all just sparks on a slot car track.  All the energy we gather individually is not enough to light a five watt bulb. Latent energy cannot be our only measure.  It can’t be all we have in our mortal purse. The human race dwells just to the left of whole numbers. Less than. We are specks.  Grains of sand.

Pollen.

Dust.

My own hubris wants more than that.

It’s too finite.

Too small.

I hate the idea of living to be old enough to shit the bed. I’m a complete coward.  I’m afraid of suffering and then dying. I just want to go. I’ll off myself when the time comes if it’s dire and inevitable.

I won’t know anything at all.  I will be nothing but dead. No future or past.  No memories.  No nostalgia. Nothing. The love I feel, and the respect I have for people who are far better than me amounts to nothing once my conscious evaporates.  When my waking facility just stops.

Don’t tell me that the prodigious intellectual abundance of people like Tesla, Marie Curie or Einstein just evaporate. That the souls of Gershwin, Mozart, Steinbeck or Poe were offered nothing in spiritual remuneration after death.  That they just melted into the ether.

What the hell is this if nothing happened for them once they ceased?

Here are my demands.  I want the ability to relive every awesome experience from my life once I expire. Over and over. As many times as I want.  My first real kiss.  The first time I heard a song I engineered and produced on the radio.  The first and only time I bought a brand new expensive car. That time I made love with the most beautiful woman I have ever known while the snow blew hard outside the high windows of her Victorian era apartment. When I understood I’d met the woman that one of us would die in front of. The gravity of her and family.  The gorgeous weight of that amount of love and responsibility.

I sat on my balcony just now drunk as a skunk and listened to the birds singing about the perfume of night blooming jasmine. I’d like to include that in my afterlife experience.

I should be allowed to play in the fields I’ve already run through.  Every living thing deserves what I’m describing. The bird, the cats, the lovely women, the teacher and me.  I can’t imagine ever being bored with the whole of it.

I will lose this battle of living.  Everybody does.  My biggest fear and most profound certainty are the exact same thing.  The fire goes out.  Life is extinguished.  It’s hard to believe, but I have no evidence at all to contradict it.  No matter what I do, no matter how much I indulge myself or champion the right thing, it just doesn’t matter.

I love going to sleep and waking up.

I want that forever.

I’ve done a pretty good job.  I’ve been honest.  There are things I’m not proud of but I’ve never fucked a single person over.  I have no formal education but I’ve done a good job of informing myself.  I’ve loved to the point of having my heart broken more than once.  My life has been full.  I would wish it on most people.  It’s been painful but lovely.

I want my head stone to say He had great hair.

If anyone delivers a eulogy, I would want them to say he was good at knowing when to be drunk and when to be sober. He was about as good at one as he was the other, because he genuinely hated most people. The few people he loved, he loved hard.

That’s gonna be tricky for whoever has to say it.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

 

4 Responses to “The Dirt Nap”

  • Steven Wolf:

    Awesome. May you drift away dreaming forever, never knowing that this is your last, and your last is forever.

    Time is strange. Who knows how fast time moves just before death. Life is bizarre and then we die.

    Drinks indeed. Namaste.

  • Elayne Johnson:

    My last love and I were together for ten years. Not “together” together, as we never actually occupied the same space at the same time, but we were together in spirit more so than most married people. We had a bond that was both amazing and devastating at different times. The first time I saw him, I recognized him even though I’d never actually met him before. He was free to be who he was, which was a damaged soul in many respects, but he never went very far away from me. When he did go away, he was never gone for long. Sometimes it hurt, but a “normal” relationship would have been the kiss of death, and a little of him was better than a whole lot of anyone else. He died in his sleep at the age of 46. That was in 2000, and I knew when we buried him that there would not be another for me, and I was fine with that. I’m still fine with that, nineteen years later. Three months after he died, he came to me in my sleep and I know that for a little while, I left this dimension and went to where he was. It was a strange experience, and strange things happened that are too lengthy to explain, but they weren’t disjointed or unreal like in most dreams. Toward the end he said to me, “I’m dead aren’t I?” I told him yes, but it was okay because we were together again and for the first time in months I could breathe. I was ready to go wherever he was going and I wanted nothing more than to be with him always. He turned to me and said, “You can’t go with me.” I started to argue with him and told him of course I could go. He said, “No, you can’t.” Then he took me by both my shoulders and physically shook me, hard, and said “Wake up Elayne!! NOW!” And I did. I sat straight up in my bed gasping for air and devastated and crying uncontrollably. No one will ever be able to tell me that wasn’t real. It was more real than most things I experience while awake in the drab, colorless existence that I call reality. I think something happens after we die. I think there’s another dimension where all the bits of energy go to gather with other bits of energy that they knew in life and still recognize even after death. Like an elephant recognizes a family member’s bones, even when they’re mixed in with hundreds of others. It’s just that the spirit realm is so surreal and hard for us beaten down humans to understand. It’s been beaten out of us, metaphorically if not physically. We’ve been indoctrinated and brainwashed and told that such things are just imaginings, even though religious people are certain that there’s an invisible man in the sky and a kingdom made of gold that’s an actual place somewhere beyond the clouds. I don’t like that description. A kingdom of gold sounds too much like Trump’s penthouse, and I think that’s horrific. I truly believe that we make our own heaven or hell after death as much as we make it here on earth. What dreams may come…

    • REIYA:

      Elayne, It sounds like you had what is referred to as a Soul Travel experience. Another name is Dream Travel. We don’t actually die, we leave the physical body, and graduate to a higher consciousness. There is no death. Animals and humans are soul’s living in physical bodies.

      Though many of us Souls are inexperienced. So we will eventually be sent back down to physical earth to refine, and evolve becoming fit to serve as coworkers of God. We reincarnate, usually with a job or purpose assigned to us by the heavenly masters. I’ve experienced out of body, soul travel, while fully conscious. I’m able to travel off the time chart, and know some of my past lives.

  • Jeffrey Casey:

    I strive to live a life more meaningless.

    No drinks for you, my friend.

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