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.

 

 

 

 

 

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