Fatigue

Humans have no hibernation
no seasonal death and rebirth,
just continual awareness and
weathering of the same body.
The candle is not burned at both ends,
it is entirely aflame.

"The living look upon the corpse with their eyesight,
But without eyesight lingers a different living
and looks curiously on the corpse."
- Whitman, To Think of Time

Death Becomes Her

"Satan reached out his hand and crushed the life out of them with his fingers, threw them away, wiped the red from his fingers on his handkerchief, and went to talking where he had left off: 'We cannot do wrong; neither have we any disposition to do it, for we do not know what it is.'"
- The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain

Alison Scarpulla

Dust

Hour ten. I-70.

The beginning of the transition to numbness, the liminal moment of a road trip where you are too far to turn back and too close to stop for the day. You got up early, ate a filling breakfast, and have been stopping only to fill the tank. You aren't yet at the point of hallucinatory fatigue.

The drive is smooth and straight, and the landscape is a rolling gray-green, a red barn or silo every so often. The drive is an extended classical ambience, like the instrumentals in Moby's When It's Cold I'd Like to Die. Cars drift close behind, break slightly as they shift lanes, and very slowly drift ahead. If you weren't moving they would essentially be passing at one miles per hour.

A compact SUV passes in front of you at a distance. The driver's window lowers and a white cloud emerges and begins dissipating. In a few seconds, you drive through the transparent veil of dust. Thousands or tens of thousands of particles enter the front grill of your car, a large percentage immediately wiping out on the metal innards. The remainder enter the air intake for the interior fan and bounce through the plastic tubes until they emerge from an interior vent. Another large amount wipe out on the interior, and your clothes, and your skin. The remainder wind up in your nose, bouncing through the fleshy tubes, into the blood stream to the brain.

The back of your head prickles with gooseflesh; your hearing sounds like listening through cotton; your pupils pulse. You become aware of the various materials of the car stretching and sighing. Clouds appear to form and burst. The sunlight trickles through them causing shadow waves, like on the bottom of a riverbed. Your car passes into an extended shadow wave, the shade immediately perceptible to all senses. You shiver.

You aren't in a hurry, but you are on the run. The objective is to stay one step ahead. Sometimes you feel like a giant fleeing a human; the slowness of a single step is all that's needed to stay out of reach. The time between steps can seem long and become comfortable until the pursuer is spotted at a distance. Death approaches patiently, unperturbed. You can feel the proximity and know the time has come to move again. Time to take the next step.

Decisions

Part of me wonders if I will get to the end of my life without having made up my mind about staying in it to begin with.

Substance D

"I saw death rising from the earth, from the ground itself, in one blue field, in stubbled color."
- Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

 

Frisbee by Atey Ghailan

Hot and Cold, pt. 2

There are two kinds of death: hot and cold.

Hot death is excitability; to be consumed by energy until all connections break and functions cease. Literally burning up. A shrew's heart beats extremely fast until it simply stops - the end of motion. What would happen if it slowed pace, would it live longer?

Cold death is the gradual slowing of processes until basic functions can't be kept up on the level of energy available. It is perhaps like anesthesia taking effect toward the end, a drift into sleep. Most old age death is likely a cold death.

Hot and Cold, pt. 1

Being too warm or too cold, beyond the edge of comfort, is the closest experience of death I’ve had at my age. During high school, I recall forsaking my love of Winter because of the pretentiousness of thinking that way. Naturally people can love Winter when they are in a warm home looking out at it. The truth is I do love Winter, the quiet, cold death. For me, it’s sort of akin to oncoming headlights in the opposite lane – moth syndrome – and if I’m not careful, I might find myself merging into it. It’s an odd, seemingly subconscious desire, to put this body through something; maybe a way of trying to grasp control of this sensory prison.

Application for Extension

You can't take it with you, or can you?
The wealthy have the means to purchase life extensions, and it makes sense to do so given that money can't be used once deceased.
When considering the afterlife, there seems to be one conclusion for those who can afford life-saving medical care. On the one hand, if there is no afterlife, then this life should be extended as long as possible since this is it. If there is an afterlife in the form of rebirth, one may end up back here in much more dire straits, in which case life should be extended while in a good position. Because energy can't vanish from the system, reincarnation seems the likely afterlife, if there is one.

"Life, friends, is boring."

I have done my living.

The development of my physicality - that continual dream state that ends in birth - and the subsequent rapid splitting of cells and in vitro growth on the culture dish that is the world. It tapers; it slows.
And I come to the beginning of the end. I know my body is settling; all the cells and neurons I will ever have shuffle about my outline like quicksand finding temporary equilibrium. I know my mind and memory dull, and things aren't quite as vibrant as they used to be.

Dying is not some sudden end
later in life;
it begins at this time, what people consider youth.
The body blossoms
again and again
with a refresh of cells that are new, yet less effective
and more error prone than their predecessors.

Many live in reverse. The prenatal dark dreams bear striking resemblance to the delirious fantasies of the deathbed, a coincidence of similarity and chemistry. "Living" is then the awakening from the dream, the day-in-day-out ache that says 'you are alive!' beginning with the ache of your first breath - the drowned breaking the water's surface.
...
I should point out that death, without interference, is painful. It happens to be, in order of occurrence, the second most jarring transition; the other being birth. The aches produced by what many consider to be living turn out to be us tip-toeing around that transition. We experience dying in many small ways before it ends.

"If you live life with awareness
You mature
A Mature one never dies,
Because he will learn even through death
Even death is going to be an experience
To be intensively Lived
Watched
Allowed"

- Osho

Those Who Die Alone

A Person collapses in the street and you hurry over and call an ambulance. Because the Person is alone, you travel with the ambulance to the hospital where a nurse asks if you are a relative. You say no; therefore, you have to wait outside. No relatives come because the Person has no living family. The System has dictated they must die alone. And so it goes.

The Note

The note read: "Chose the wrong species. Will try again."

Dreamt

I've been having vivid dreams lately, strange ones. It seems the melatonin is becoming variable because not all my dreams are like this, though I have started taking it every night rather than stopping on the weekends, to avoid the hangover effect of the hormone.
I forget these dreams because I stop thinking about them which is why I'm writing this one here. I believe I had two dreams last night, and this isn't strange but for the fact that each was at the same location and yet not.

The first scene took place in a large mansion and all I remember is that it was a rugged old home and that I had some purpose within it.
The second scene took place outdoors in a mid-depth pool of clear, still water. Looking one direction showed me the mansion a little way off and looking the other way showed me an orange-red marmalade sky of a setting sun. A little grassy distance on every side ended abruptly as if the location were on a cliff or it was floating in the air.
Mikenzie, a small girl in my hall with an attractive pixie cut, was there and looked quite cat-like. She had these sharp claws that dug into me and hurt me. There was someone or something else there that told me things, like the fact that Mikenzie was cat girl and evil and had nine lives. I picked up bits that reminded me that within the house I fought many evil characters, and Mikenzie was the last. I can't remember who the hinter was or why it was there.
The only thing I had at my disposal was the pool, so I drowned Mikenzie many times as she scratched back. Suddenly, though, everything went melodramatic and the setting sun became even deeper, the hinter was farther in the background, and Mikenzie was laying in my arms looking up at me with innocent eyes, as is shown in many movies. She said that she was evil and had to die and so was resigned to it. I started to cry because I really didn't want to take her last life, and so I held her to me, and she said it had to be done. I kept crying as I started lowering her without resistance to the water and the sun kept setting. Then I woke up.

I've been tired all day. I think I wanted to keep dreaming to see what would have happened next.

If I Were To Go

Currently listening to:
Thrill is gone
B.B.King

Last night I had this weird sort of headache and sore back. It was a sort of pressure in my head that made me lose feeling so that everything was dull. There have been some cases of meningococcal disease on campus, one resulting in death. I thought to myself as I lay in bed, what if I have this meningitis form? and perhaps this was my last night (death supposedly results quickly from it). I've always believed diseases should be kept around for population control, so I knew not to be fearful of any sort of end; I don't want to be contradictory. If this was to be the end, then so be it, my regrets being the writings I didn't finish and the packages I ordered that I wouldn't receive. Fortunately Dandelion's stuff was sent out earlier in the week.
This morning my back was still sore and I now feel slightly chill, probably a minor fever. I think this is just some twenty-four hour deal.

Funerals

I was a leader again, at work. After work my apathy level steadily rose. I think this happens after periods of stressful emotion, sort of a burn out, and I'm mellow. Maybe it's also like getting sick: you catch it and then you're immune from getting it again immediately. Interesting stuff.

So while I was busy not caring in math class, I kind of did this eye rolling head falling thing and I thought I might be in the process of fainting. I wish I had, the day would have been more interesting; though I would have to make up the math test, and I'm glad I got that out of the way. Hurrah for not fainting, then!

Today's thought features funeral processions because one passed me a couple weeks ago. I find it odd that someone's leftovers are carted in parade fashion, and that everyone seems to know to not drive passed it. No one worries about being late for work.
I know it's a respect deal, but then no one respects a vehicle carrying a piano. I see little difference in the remains of a tree and the remains of a human, except that the tree does even more after death. It's going to be weird when we run out of places to bury people.

I wonder when I'm going to run out of ideas to babble about.
-I've never met a tree I didn't like- (can't say that about many things in life)