Everybody Is Out To Get Me: Death. Do It Right.

“My concept of death for a long time was to come down that mountain road at a hundred and twenty and just keep going straight right there, burst out through the barrier and hang out above all that . . . and there I'd be sitting in the front seat, stark naked, with a cast of whiskey next to me, and a case of dynamite in the trunk . . . honking the horn, and the lights on, and just sit there in space for an instant, a human bomb, and fall down into that mess of steel mills. It'd be a tremendous goddamn explosion. No pain. No one would get hurt. I'm pretty sure, unless they've changed the highway, that launching place is still there. As soon as I get home, I ought to take a drive just to check it out.” Hunter S. Thompson

That sounds about right although I’m not advocating death as a Goddamn hobby because there are too many amateurs out there who will think it’s the new “in” thing to do and they will somehow fuck it up. You only get one good shot at death and if your nerves aren’t steady, your hand slips or your legs give out at a crucial moment you’ll spend the rest of your days in some assisted care living facility sucking pureed rutabagas out of a straw and watching your insane roommate jack off to Martha Stewart baking a lemon crusted tart on Oprah. It’s not a pretty picture I paint but then I didn’t write this to coddle the weak kneed or the faint of heart because well, they’re lost causes anyway.

If the assisted living scenario doesn’t deter you from taking that final big black step, as I like to call it, then you might want to chew on another less than palpable piece of tin roofing. If life has got you way down, you walked in on your landlord screwing your lifeless beagle or some tattling coworker caught you in the bathroom stall at work sticking $400,000 dollars worth of embezzled company stock certificates into a bodily orifice or some other likely scenario then I want you to pause and consider those that you’re leaving behind before you eat that cyanide laced burrito. Yeah, I know I hated pulling that floppy ace card out from under my toupee but it had to be done but not for the reasons that are sitting on that hardly used filing cabinet in the records department of your brain. Sure, someone will care you’re gone but that’s not what I’m talking about. What I would want you to consider is all of us that will have to attend those sappy postmortem ceremonies. Do you really think I want to see you lying in some high priced packing crate made up like Bela Lugosi with crouched and weeping widows sniffling into hankies that smell like 28th century horse blankets? Sure I want to sit through six hours of lamenting and bawling from the speeches of your sixty closest friends. Would that preacher with the eye patch and dandruff on his lapel really think you’re in heaven with the divine flocks dancing with angels? If anything you’d be up there with a pooper scooper following the flocks around making minimum wage and living in a tenement cloud. Death has its reality too and if there is a heaven you might want to consider your status here on earth as you weren’t exactly a choirboy down here so I wouldn’t rush to the exit door.

As a last resort to dissuade you from checking before your stay is through I will promise to unleash an unholy torrent of largely fallacious anecdotes about your character once they have laid the turf over the dirt spot on your grave. It’s called blackmail my friend and I’m not above it. In fact I’ll tell everyone that you’re a goat abuser and a premature ejaculator that never satisfied anything other than the loan on his 78 Malibu. So don’t you dare try dying on me. Leave that doomsday scenario to the pros. You’ll be no Goddamn good at dying. I’m sure of it. Get it? Got it? Good.