Death

I don't deal with death like a normal person. The only deaths I have cried over were my dad's, a Cocker Spaniel I used to have named Sonny, a friend from the first grade named Joe Shoeford (Yea, I was Joe's Buddy), and Kate Waring whom was the victim of a homicide. That's 4 people compared however many people I have known that aren't around anymore.

I realized I didn't handle death like a normal person when I witnessed an autopsy when I was 18 for my thesis on "Mycobacteriophages and DNA Vaccines for Tuberculosis". Yeah, the same guy that passed up on a free ride to Duke because he'd rather punch and choke guys in spandex; no-boner.

I witnessed everything first hand. The scalpel delicately carving the Y-incinsion in the chest and abdomen. The exposing of the rib cage by pulling the skin off like its a wrapper for cold cuts. Get it? Cold cuts because a dead body is cold and cut open?

I watched as the pathologist/coroner used saw that could cut through bone, but not skin, to cut open the deceased's rib cage. I began to have an odd curiosity as every organ was removed and weighed like meat at a butcher shop. I held my nose at the behest of the coroner as the gall bladder was removed since the smell was two steps beyond anything that could be produced by a port-a-potty 4 days into Bonaroo.

I watched as an incision was made from ear lobe to ear lobe along the rear base of the man's skull before the skin was pulled up and scrunched the front the guy's face making it look like that of a shar pei sucking on a lemon. The the skull was opened up with the saw to expose the guys brain so it could also be removed and weighed. I remember having to keep from laughing as they left the guy like that to go to lunch. To me it was a dead guy with a face like a stack of flap jacks at the moment. I had no emotions but I was hungry for some Subway.

This baffled my mom as I explained it to her. I guess she was expecting me to come crying to her so she could reassure me with some promise of Heaven or whatever fairy tale she used to escape pragmatism. Instead she just got an explanation of what happened in detail like you just got. Hungry?

The truly odd thing about me is that blood and guts doesn't bother me but spoiled food will make me vomit like a runway model minus shoving a finger down my throat whilst my head hovers above a toilet seat with cocaine residue.

I won't say that I became apathetic towards death that day but I would be lying if I had said that it was a traumatic experience. It was more calming than anything else. I realized that our perspectives towards mortality were highly skewed. I hadn't formed a concrete opinion on it but I knew most people had it dead wrong; all pun intended. As the years went on I started to experience more and more tragedy as friends and family began dying off. As I am writing this I am dealing with the passing of another family member. As odd as it might sound I m actually relieved that he passed away since he was suffering from issues that began to take hold of him after my dad passed away. He was an artist like I aspire to be, him with piano while I try to with a keyboard and a microphone, and like many an artist he was suffering the end result when you lose other intellectuals to bounce ideas off of from your social circle. In this case the beginning of the end was the passing of my dad. It was a very harsh blow to myself and my family; but I noticed it was especially hard for him. The spark that made him who he was lost. The particles of intellectual curiosity that he was entangled to were no longer around to communicate. For an intellectual this is worse than death.

That's because the ultimate drug for an intellectual is a stimulating conversation. For him it was over a chess board with my dad during holiday gatherings. For most guys it's sex but a smart guy eventually realizes sex is just a drug that gets skewed from the idolization of a society that continues to look upon it with a reverence of ego and ignorance. That's why I get laid; to me sex is just a drug that keeps me stable and is relatively healthy compared to our other "important" activities that ironically revolve around sexual selection. If natural selection governs the evolution of life then sexual selection governs the evolution of modern society. My uncle knew this along with my dad as I have I come to learn it. The best high an intellectual can have is a eureka moment from conversing with those that think outside the box. Go long enough without that then you just wish to go off in peace with your dignity intact. That's why I choose to struggle with money by writing and doing comedy instead of just tossing my free will to the side and joining the rat race we call capitalism. Don't get me wrong, capitalism allows me that luxury but it takes pawns for such a luxury to exist.

 The biggest disservice I could do to our society or myself is to live by its dogmas. That's why I'm going to achieve fame or die trying; probably in a hotel bedroom with my corpse surrounded by used condoms and the crescendo of screams of a mixed race coed whom just discovered that erections happen from rigor mortis.

I can make such a statement nonchalantly because I won't know it when it happens because I'll be dead. Just like most people that have ever existed are as well as 99% of life that ever walked this Earth has. They died, they are gone, for most of them they were cannon fodder to be emulsified to fuel the train that is life and unlike most trains life is a Transformer that wipes the floor with anything of its presence and choosing anytime it wishes. That's because life has the inevitable trump card of death and what many fail to realize is that they are just drugs built upon drugs. That's what death is; it's a drug. It's the altering of an experience only there is no coming down from it once given too big a dose. Life is a drug too. It's all drugs. One drug allows the experience of evolved primates that complain about Justin Beiber, Ebola, the economy, and the line at Starbucks while the other offers silence or a dream. Just like any drug, death gets a lot of bad press via the idolization of society but once you try it it's probably not that bad.

Worst comes to worse well----actually that's not even the worst. It's just an altered experience. What's really the worst is wasting an experience on the fear of an unknown experience. If you want to get over the concept of death then stop worrying about it since death is a very good drug dealer. It'll give you your dose when you're ready and you won't even have to worry about it because you'll be dead. Now go out there and make your life something worth dying for. That's the way you beat death, by making your juice not worth it's squeeze until it relinquishes itself to operating on your terms. That's how winning is done.