It’s 7:22, Arizona time, and I’m sitting at poolside, four or five rabbits are short-sprinting on the lawn; night draws nigh. It is dusk, my favorite time. It is the lull all humans need if they are dimly awake — and aware. The heat of the day is fleeing, a soothing breeze crosses my face, a clutch of birds are hobnobbing about. The water in the pool is becoming still and stiller. And there is a warmth in the air, dry, Sinaitic. Birds in the distance chorus. A couple, hand in hand, walk by. And I sit here, pen in hand, scribbling, as I must do. I am compelled to do so.
Given what I have already said in this memoir, there is no purpose for my writing. I write like my big toe grows nail. It is what it is. I feel the urge to urinate, as my prostate is enlarged — it does what it does — and I feel the need to pee. I go inside now, this interlude between interludes, broken by other bodily needs, everything doing what its designed to do. I feel restful tonight.
I can’t see Mt. Lemmon from my window, but it is still smoldering; it will take a few more weeks before it is extinguished. And by that time I will have also ended our relationship of late. When the fires are gone and Mt. Lemmon goes on, there will be no need on my part to engage in a dialogue. The mountain has spoken to me these past ten days. Upon rising I assessed the mountain’s impact upon my self. At moments it has made me reflective, meditative, rueful, disquieted and philosophical.
When the fires are memory, I may have some years further to smoke and smolder, as I have embers of my own which cannot be extinguished. At 63 medical problems loom more than ever, and although I put on a brave front, implacable death is a continuing issue for me, for I am curious how I will “handle” it. If, like my wife, Rochelle, you died in an accident, you never deal with it., But if it is a disease, and you linger, how do you deal with it? Maybe things are different now, who knows, but when I grew up the dying were not given the right to know that. We all know that dying can be painful and that death itself is so mysterious that we really can’t conceptualize it, except to theorize about it, or like myself, create self-parables to cope with it, parables just a defense against the gritty realities. I’ve noticed these past ten days a general anxiety about my self, so that I have not had a good night’s sleep. I pee, I eat, I read, i write, I drink seltzer and juice, I just can’t sleep. The boob tube is useless. I remember when TV was so good it put you to sleep. This newer TV keeps you awake, jarred by the nagging narcissism that the Bill O’Reillys spread like so much mulch.
I cannot imagine my own death and dying, but it is coming. Heaven and hell, constructs for the conditioned mind, I find abhorrent. Reincarnation is an idiot’s delight. Since I have been constructed at a molecular level, randomly, in an act of absent-mindedness on the part of the cosmos, so that I come from nowhere and will return to nowhere, what is there left to feel — or think — or believe? One blip in the vast oceanic void and then I return to the vast nothingness. When I saw my dead wife on a morgue gurney, her beautiful profile before me through the “viewing window,” I was given the vilest answer imaginable as a human being.
I refuse, as is my way, to draw meaning, or a lesson, from what I experience, contrary to conventional wisdom. The rarity of our beingness, the rarity of existence — how we are punched into life, does not compel me to be better, to live for the moment, to do good deeds — to see the world and life as a precious gift, for such Hallmarkian sentiments do not move me. I am frozen to all that. I may just be frozen. I may be beyond all numbness, an inadequate statement of a great fear of death. I don’t know.
I do know, like the clicking of an old Paper-Mate ballpoint, in and out, in and out smoothly, for thousands of times. I am here. I am not here. What lesson ( who needs a lesson) can be drawn from this? It is, what is.
The only respite I have are my senses. The heat of the day, the susurrance of deciduous trees, the smell of a perfect brisket, the nose-turning pungency of a good mustard, the near death experience of an orgasm, the oneness with the world as one freely ejaculates and anxiety ebbs, all the senses that I idiosyncratically enjoy. All this gives me pleasure. I should be grateful that when I die all memory, all remembering, dies with me. What more horrible destiny than to die and one’s consciousness goes on. Sleep is the universe’s only kindness, a quirk, at that, a wrinkle in time.
Death is the cosmo’s fly swatter, one less, to make room for one more. After all, who mourns for a mosquito knocked silly? I think the universe works in this way. What is frightening to the human race is the complete and total nothingness of it, that this wondrous, endless, eddy of universes within universes, has no design except to exist, or be, or run along. I can only estimate , based on the narrowly focused and prejudicial ideas I have gathered in 63 years, a gnat’s conclusion. . .(to be continued).
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