Don’t fear the reaper

Time and death lay heavy for all men. They are as they were the year before.

Time may be a fragment of our imagination or a concept our minds can’t yet fully overcome, but as it is today, if your friend Justin takes a digital cam picture and then shows it to you, then your mind process the fact that this image is of a person younger than you.

While it doesn’t feel the effect now, it processes it just the same. And it puts a little bit of memory attached, so that maybe, if booze and/or drugs and/or emotional trauma haven’t destroyed the moment, you can think both of where you were then and the spot you sit in now.

And that’s how we grow up. All the more nostalgic and all the more filled with images to tie us to other places.

Maybe Oprah succeeds because some people (women and gay men) are able to surround any drab room with fabulous picture frames. Instead of having nothing to occupy our living rooms but log’s, a fireplace, and if you are lucky… a fire (think 1875) or a room filled with home videos, DVD’s of escapist adventures, and immediate views of the life you have lived.

You can watch Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit” if you want to read the facts behind the myths of aging creams, treatments, or processes. There isn’t a viable way to live beyond your given time. By living healthier, avoiding stress, and devoting considerable amounts of every day to staying in top shape one could theoretically add anywhere from 10 days to 25 years against the average. Odds are you will die in a hospital.

So too could you eat anything you wanted, do copious amounts of drugs, and fuck anything that moves, regardless of the HIV. Odds are your death will be in a last act thrill seeking, sobriety optional.

In the end, one dies because of combination of things, all of them variable on how you lived and none of them specifically related to in what shape you are in. If it’s your time, it’s your time. It could be god (unlikely) it could be destiny (see god) it could just be that your body was not in the shape it needed to be to survive the event that just killed it (we have a winner).

Whether one believes in a heaven above or something…logical, Christians, Neo-Cons, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, or suicide bombers all know that death is coming one way or another.

Yet I can’t think of a time when death was more feared than it ever has been. And I don’t mean on a basic level, a la D-day, when private Jones from Iowa with the swell gal at home waiting for him was sent to take either Dog, Sword, or Omaha beach, and Jones knew if he saw tomorrow he still had a 50% shot of dying on foreign soil.

I write in a decent amount about the scale of media overload in this world. I think we are more afraid of death now than ever because we are reminded at every instance what we will lose when we die.

200 years ago, at best, all anyone had to remember another person of were letters. Pieces of paper that were sure to rot over time.

Now, a person can’t live without living a digital imprint of their soul on myspace. I wonder if there is a link on the site for those who have died since being on the site.

You know what if this hasn’t’ happened already, I’m claiming credit. Call it Dave’sDeathDen.com .

I want a digital graveyard. I want a dead.myspace.com, forget my DWOM (drunk while on myspace) club, I want a resting place for digital souls of people. Not only for people I once knew (or people I called “friends” on the site, even though I only accepted half the girls cause they were hot), but for others as well. For the meth addicts, the drunk drivers, the HIV victims, and lastly those who died because of non-idiotic reasons.

If technology gives me anything, I hope I don’t have to go to a graveyard to cry over lost family members.

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Terrorists and Islamic extremists had been killing everyone pre 2001. But after September we were terrified of dying that way.

As life becomes more technological it makes our lives all the easier and all the less realistic. Typing data for eight hours is not living, per se. The only thing dangerous about that kind of work is the location in relation to tectonic plates/ terrorist targets / tornado zones. In all reality the most dangerous part of the day is the drive home from work, when either you or the driver in another lane thinks about the next errand while changing lanes.

The song you by Joan Byez “you don’t’ know what it’s got (‘til it’s gone)” used to be a song about environmentalism. Then it was a metaphor for loss. Then it was about love. Remind you this was a song that started about nature and then ended up the theme song for a Hugh Grant movie (sung by a former Counting Crow).

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Never in our lives have we been reminded as frequently as we are about our own vitality, about what we have been given simply by being born.

We know more than any generation before us that we are going to die because of the nick-nacks we surround ourselves with, from pictures of those who we died before us to those who will pass after us.

It is one thing to hold onto an artifact of someone you loved, like a wedding band, love letters, or media. I myself will probably always hold onto to my bear Toliver, not because I feel like a kid, but because as far as I can rationale, this little stuffed toy represents closeness to my parents in a way nothing apart from seeing them can replicate.

It is another to create a photo log of the year of ones friends on myspace. Myspace is perhaps the most alluring and easiest drug to come along to a mass audience since weed. And just like Mary Jane it’s an entryway to worse and more addictive things. Myspace is the digital version of scrap-booking, and all it does is allow someone to add meaning in images instead of memories. It’s easy, it’s comforting, and maybe in the ends it’s a celebration of happiness, because if one really looks at their friend list of 85 people, they should know that 85 people are going to die. Or at least they should filter the possibility.

That dumb little bear represents my childhood and my parents. It is maybe one of three things of such importance in my life. It gets to the point where I can’t think about the fact I have had the bear for 23 years now.

But that bear is all I really have in my daily life to remind me of my childhood and my parents. Everything else is memory and pictures I keep out of site. They are like the rose bushes of Capt. Miller’s wife; I save those just for me. When I go, they, and all of their potency goes with me.

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Where the hell is this going?

Well, it’s a post that includes two mp3’s about death.

The dylan song'is from his 1997 album, Time out Of Mind. It’s about growing old, dying slowly, and being left alone with nothing but your memories.

The Drive by trucker’s song is also the title of Archibald Montenegro’s Myspace page,

shut-up-and-get-on-the-plane'.

Off the epic Southern Rock Opera double album, it’s the southern rock non-redneck America has been waiting for since Duane Allman died. The song is a blending of a blue collar worker’s life and views tied together with the final moments on the ground for Lynyrd Skynrd.

I know that sounds needlessly complicated.

I’ll just give you the some of the opening verse of the song:

We’ve been this close to death before; we were just too drunk to know it.
Yes the price of being sober is being scared out of your mind...

Shut your mouth and get your ass on the plane.

For those of you not versed in Southern Rock folklore, a good majority of the band that made Free Bird and Sweet Home Alabama were killed in a plane crash, no doubt under a veil of FUI.

It’s the vocal equivalent of pouring gasoline on the stakes you are being burned upon. If you are forced with a death or death situation, you might as well end it on your terms.

We’re all dying, might as well do it on my terms.

I am scared of death? Nah. I got over that three years ago, and I’ve been peacefully calm about it ever since (about death anyway, if I’m going, at least I had some good times). I’m scared of not living. I’m scared of never having enough stories to tell my kids or having them for that matter, but under that rationale lies the idea that maybe, just maybe, if I don’t have kids it was due to the fact that: A. I’ve been rendered infertile from years of videogames (god hope, because I don’t like condoms) and TV B. I wasn’t supposed to have kids.

But I have planned my funeral.

I am going to have an open bar.

I am going to pay at least two random women to come to the funeral and cry loudly about me leaving.

“OH DAVID. WHY GOD WHYYYYYYY! TAKE ME INSTEAD LORD.”

I’d like to be cleared of embalming fluid and have it replaced with explosives after the open casket.

My body will be dumped into the ocean after the open casket. (and I mean 1500 miles from any coast). I’d like to give some shark a rude awakening.

Ka-Blammo.

After my body turns into a funeral pyre, I hope everyone gets nice and drunk. Then the executor will put in a tape of songs I chose. From the Stone’s “You Can’t always get what you want” to The Boss’s “Born to Run” and “The Weight” by the Band.

It will be a five drink minimum.

In the end everyone should be hammered enough. A shark, hopefully one who was on the endangered list, will be belly up, and in the background, a lady in a black veil will be heard intermittently over “The End” off Abbey Road.

And I sure as hell am not going to allow cameras.

I want you to see my tombstone.

“Here lies David C. Turner. Born 1981. Died 2053. “My only regret is not living longer”

It’s not about knowing what you got until it’s gone, it’s about not celebrating the meaningless.

I’m getting on the plane and getting off myspace. (unless I’m kicked off, you can still use it to contact me, I’ll check it periodically)

Not immediately, that’s not my style.

I am going to go down in flames.

Expect nude pictures. Fear aggressive attacks on your character.

I’m sixteen again and back in my “bring them down to my level” phase.

The price of being sober is being scared out of you mind.

Noodle that one next time you look for the song that best captures your essence.

I’m getting on the plane, and getting on with my life.

I don’t want to be remembered by some picture stored on a hard drive owned by Rupert Murdoch (billionaire tyrant).

I hope you’ll remember me by something real.