Well one thing I have ever thought about and ruminated over as a methodist who has fallen from grace and faith is the concept of death, experience, and conscious thought. I don't think there's a man or woman alive who hasn't considered it in some way. Well. Some consider it.
I obsess over it.
Sometimes when I consider it, it does nothing. I am thinking about it now, and at least for now, it isn't a particularly alarming concept.
Hup. Wait. Nope, the panic button's been hit.
You see, I am not just fearful of death. I am outright fucking terrified of it. I revel in the delights of experience and of the joy of simply being. Sensory input is a delightful thing to me; simple things like the smell of food or flowers, the subtle variations in flavor, the subtle buzz of a drag of smoke from a cigarette, the sensory-warping blanket of THC. The sound of music pulsing in a nightclub, the close press of dancing bodies and just letting yourself go and not caring, about not giving a fuck, the outright stupid-happy feeling of being perfectly drunk, the feel of a soft blanket...
Talking with friends. Reading. Looking at porn. Looking at artwork. Look at pornographic artwork. Talking with friends and reading comments on a piece of pornographic artwork. Just sitting back and watching a movie, playing video games.
Some people feel the need to ceaselessly pursue wealth and "success" as a means to validate their lives. That all right there is all the validation I need. Anything else is just a bonus.
And so, death terrifies me. The thought of any kind of it. Especially a painful one, where my last few thoughts, the last moments of my existence before annihilation, are not of happy reflection but of despair and agony and terror. Whenever I shower, I dread doing so, not because I dislike being clean, quite the opposite. No, I dread doing so because of the inevitable introspective thinking, and the rumination on death. I love the fact that I have thought...that I am alive. I love conscious thought. I don't know what life was like when I was a newborn and have no memories...but when I begin to think of it, I realize there was a blankness. Fuzzy hazes permeate back even to when I was four or so. I can hardly remember those days, much less before that time. My father, I cannot remember any details of his face the last time he picked me up before he went off to fight and inevitably die in Iraq during Operation: Desert Storm. There is a blurry haze and some indistinct outlines. That is all.
I begin to consider death. I try to imagine what it is like. At first in my mind I picture...darkness. Silence. Numbness. But then I realize that even then, darkness is something you perceive. And so is silence. And numbness. You can understand that those things are something you can understand as being the result of absence of something else. So you CANNOT "feel" numbness, "see" darkness, "hear" silence... Those elements are gone. There is a void. No sensory input. No identity. No awareness. No conscious. Simply...nothing. I will obviously feel no fear, no pain at this point...but neither will I feel anything else. Who I am...will cease to be. I will enter the void, and never even be aware of when it comes over me.
When that day comes, of course...there will be nothing. I cannot be sad when I am dead. Because I will be dead. Nor angry or happy or anything.
The prospect of this...the prospect of absolute nothing-ness...
It scares the fuck out of me. And every story, movie, and platitude I hear about immortality and how it would be so bad and how life would become boring, I call bullshit on...because they're written from the perspectives of mortals.
An eternity of forever feeling? Of forever experiencing? Of forever being able to feel the soft skin of a lover beneath my fingertips, of forever being able to experience happiness and joy, sadness and pain as they may come? Or absolute nothingness.
Give me the eternity. Please, fuck, give me the eternity, I beg of you; an eternity of experience is infinitely more enticing than an abrupt end and everything I've done and everything I've experienced meaning absolutely nothing and fading forever into nothingness.
But...religion promises me this. It promises me eternities, either of agony, or...well, no idea what the alternative is; supposedly the great pleasures of contemplating the suffering of the damned and shit like that. With this abject terror of death on my mind, one would think I would be a believer, right? False comforts are, at least, comforts, yeah? Except, you can't believe someone when they've lied to you a dozen times. You can't watch the sex tape your lover took of them fucking someone else and go "this did not happen" and actually believe the words you speak unless you're just in denial. So I cannot turn to religion, because religion is a liar, and even if I WANTED to believe, at this point, I could not.
I keep hoping science will find a way to instill immortality, like via prosthetic bodies or something but, how would they? They can hardly research stem cell applications for diseases without the idiotic religious masses getting in a "moral uproar," as if they know a thing about morality anyways... Much less designing immortality.
*sighs* Truth be told I don't even know why I'm posting this. Writing this out hasn't made me feel better. And I didn't suspect it would, either. I guess I'm just wondering if anyone else ever feels this way, or has ever given his as much obsessive thought as I have.
I obsess over it.
Sometimes when I consider it, it does nothing. I am thinking about it now, and at least for now, it isn't a particularly alarming concept.
Hup. Wait. Nope, the panic button's been hit.
You see, I am not just fearful of death. I am outright fucking terrified of it. I revel in the delights of experience and of the joy of simply being. Sensory input is a delightful thing to me; simple things like the smell of food or flowers, the subtle variations in flavor, the subtle buzz of a drag of smoke from a cigarette, the sensory-warping blanket of THC. The sound of music pulsing in a nightclub, the close press of dancing bodies and just letting yourself go and not caring, about not giving a fuck, the outright stupid-happy feeling of being perfectly drunk, the feel of a soft blanket...
Talking with friends. Reading. Looking at porn. Looking at artwork. Look at pornographic artwork. Talking with friends and reading comments on a piece of pornographic artwork. Just sitting back and watching a movie, playing video games.
Some people feel the need to ceaselessly pursue wealth and "success" as a means to validate their lives. That all right there is all the validation I need. Anything else is just a bonus.
And so, death terrifies me. The thought of any kind of it. Especially a painful one, where my last few thoughts, the last moments of my existence before annihilation, are not of happy reflection but of despair and agony and terror. Whenever I shower, I dread doing so, not because I dislike being clean, quite the opposite. No, I dread doing so because of the inevitable introspective thinking, and the rumination on death. I love the fact that I have thought...that I am alive. I love conscious thought. I don't know what life was like when I was a newborn and have no memories...but when I begin to think of it, I realize there was a blankness. Fuzzy hazes permeate back even to when I was four or so. I can hardly remember those days, much less before that time. My father, I cannot remember any details of his face the last time he picked me up before he went off to fight and inevitably die in Iraq during Operation: Desert Storm. There is a blurry haze and some indistinct outlines. That is all.
I begin to consider death. I try to imagine what it is like. At first in my mind I picture...darkness. Silence. Numbness. But then I realize that even then, darkness is something you perceive. And so is silence. And numbness. You can understand that those things are something you can understand as being the result of absence of something else. So you CANNOT "feel" numbness, "see" darkness, "hear" silence... Those elements are gone. There is a void. No sensory input. No identity. No awareness. No conscious. Simply...nothing. I will obviously feel no fear, no pain at this point...but neither will I feel anything else. Who I am...will cease to be. I will enter the void, and never even be aware of when it comes over me.
When that day comes, of course...there will be nothing. I cannot be sad when I am dead. Because I will be dead. Nor angry or happy or anything.
The prospect of this...the prospect of absolute nothing-ness...
It scares the fuck out of me. And every story, movie, and platitude I hear about immortality and how it would be so bad and how life would become boring, I call bullshit on...because they're written from the perspectives of mortals.
An eternity of forever feeling? Of forever experiencing? Of forever being able to feel the soft skin of a lover beneath my fingertips, of forever being able to experience happiness and joy, sadness and pain as they may come? Or absolute nothingness.
Give me the eternity. Please, fuck, give me the eternity, I beg of you; an eternity of experience is infinitely more enticing than an abrupt end and everything I've done and everything I've experienced meaning absolutely nothing and fading forever into nothingness.
But...religion promises me this. It promises me eternities, either of agony, or...well, no idea what the alternative is; supposedly the great pleasures of contemplating the suffering of the damned and shit like that. With this abject terror of death on my mind, one would think I would be a believer, right? False comforts are, at least, comforts, yeah? Except, you can't believe someone when they've lied to you a dozen times. You can't watch the sex tape your lover took of them fucking someone else and go "this did not happen" and actually believe the words you speak unless you're just in denial. So I cannot turn to religion, because religion is a liar, and even if I WANTED to believe, at this point, I could not.
I keep hoping science will find a way to instill immortality, like via prosthetic bodies or something but, how would they? They can hardly research stem cell applications for diseases without the idiotic religious masses getting in a "moral uproar," as if they know a thing about morality anyways... Much less designing immortality.
*sighs* Truth be told I don't even know why I'm posting this. Writing this out hasn't made me feel better. And I didn't suspect it would, either. I guess I'm just wondering if anyone else ever feels this way, or has ever given his as much obsessive thought as I have.
