Of Nothingness

                The first hundred years or so (or at least what seems that long), are spent nervously reliving every memory you remember, and some you never even considered. Every adventure, every kiss, every fuck, every job, every illness, every t.v. show, every trip to the men's room, every storm you sat through, every meal you ate, every car you saw, every book you read— I think you catch my drift.

         Once those start to slip, you spend the next hundred years perusing your sensory library. Seeing, touching, smelling, seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and seeing every thing you ever came in contact with all over again.

         Eventually your memories fade out and get mixed up, like your favorite radio station on a road trip. You lost your virginity at five, you lost your first tooth at twenty in an apple, and god bless you if you can remember what kind of apple it was. You were born with blonde hair, but soon died it brown, and the resident doctor suggested keeping blonde highlights. At this point in time you can remember how the apple tasted but... What color was it?

Golden delicious, or granny smith? (It was macintosh.)

         Music and melodies will be the second thing to go, right after you forget colors, shapes, and most of the other stuff you learned in kindergarten. Tastes will get up and head that way before you even know it. (Oh, what i'd do for a klondike bar.) Pretty soon all you'll have is smells, since, it is unanimous in the scientific world, they are the strongest senses tied to memory. The good thing is that they are strongly linked to objects, tastes and other memories that are all packing their things and moving out of your theoretical mind. Keeping a strong hold on smells is a good way to backtrack and recall some things. Yet when you find them, sometimes they are only footprints in the snow, quickly being covered up by a nor' easter. Soon to be lost, and must be continuously stomped upon to keep the imprint. You'll wish you had snow shoes.

         The only way I'm even able to relay these messages is through a ridiculously complex set of routines on eternal repeat. In stopping to even recite this, i could be losing anything and everything i ever loved, but I'm thousands of years past worrying over anything, or everything for that matter. It's not peaceful here, and there is no sleep. It is a world of fear, nostalgia, and smells. (Good and bad.)

         Alive, i never really thought of dying, now dead, i tend to forget about it.

         Centuries for me, days in the living world, the doctors will tell you, or may tell you, i died maybe a month or a week ago. Alone on a hospital bed around midnight, tubes and wires running the course of my body. Just prior, i had been unconscious, in a sort of coma (very reminiscent of where i am now) unaware of any goings on or anything at all. However to this moment i remember the events leading up to my death with odd detail and bizarre clarity. It is the only firm, unmovable memory which will not blow away in the nor' easter no matter how little i stomp. The print always remains with odd clarity, bizarre detail.

         I was freshly twenty, my face still young, somewhat smooth, and freckled. My metabolism, fair. My hair, full and thick. My sexual appetite, vast. Still young and hip.

Not ready to die.

         I had a little junky honda accord with dirty clothes and hairnets from my fast food career carelessly strewn about. I had a basement suite in a friend's house. I had potential.

Absolutely not  ready to die.

         Anyhow, me and honda-- excuse me,
         
         Honda and I  were on our way to work. It was summer and the temperature was telling itself, creating illusions on the asphalt and liquifying candy bars left in parked automobiles.

         I was about halfway to my job on that fateful day, when i noticed two things. One was a nice-looking silver '98 pontiac firebird approaching me on the other side of the road.

         Thing number two was a pack of molten m&m's spreading itself along the floorboard of my passenger seat. The bag had been ripped open and then hastily thrown aside, allowing the wild m&m's to roll freely across the wide open carpet. Time plus heat had induced them into a semi-solid which was now engulfing the carpeting in my honda.

         Somewhat pissed off by both the mess in my seat, and the difference in the bad-assness between my honda and the firebird quickly approaching me, i punched the steering wheel, jolting the car to the left, then correcting.

         I quickly judged the distance between the firebird and my honda, mentally (and foolishly) allowing myself fifteen seconds before the two passed each other. An event i needed to be behind the wheel for. Plenty of time, right?

         I took a deep breath and leaned off to the right side of the car, using my left hand to keep the wheel steady. I was right handed.

         As i used the M&M wrapper to scrape up the liquid chocolate and peanuts, bobbing around like buoys in a sea of shit, i suddenly recounted the firebird, blurry and wavering in the heat, probably traveling faster than the honda. Sportscar pilots like to drive fast. Faster than i'd mentally calculated, perhaps. I pulled myself back up to the view of the road in time to see the pontiac, a silver bullet piercing the illusive veil of mirage created by the cruel summer, still holding my makeshift paper cup of chocolate and peanut soup.

         I was heading right for the silver bullet, like a suicidal werewolf.

         Before i knew it, the honda and i were upside down in a ditch, still sliding at am impressive thirty miles an hour. Just as my sideview mirror broke off, i saw in it a body, rolling down the hill into the ditch with the honda and i. Grey hair, oakley sunglasses, a red polo and khaki cargo shorts. Typical sportscar owner. Too wealthy to worry about seatbelts, he was covered in blood which blossomed beautifully from a cut in his patch of grey hair. I looked back to the windshield in time to see that i was approaching an embankment, something like a fun-size cliff. The beginnings of the woods that most unlucky passersby on HWY 92 just don't have time to appreciate. The honda and i careened off the embankment and instantly became a UFO for two squirrels fighting over an acorn. I hit a gang of trees before i hit the ground. I remember that because i recall colliding with the tree gang's leader with a loud crunch!  but i do not recall ever landing. Maybe i never did.

There was still chocolate all over my right arm as my stretcher burst through the double doors of the E.R.

         That's how it happened. I must've been banged up pretty bad, because here i am, one week, or month, or several thousand years later, residing in the nothingness. The fringe of death. The darkness. The uninhabited places you can't begin to imagine when you're alive. There is no heaven or hell, as far as i can tell. No reincarnation as of yet. Nothing at all.

         Sometimes i like to imagine (and hope) I'm still in that friendly little coma in some hospital bed, in  a sterile wing of the building where they keep the brain-dead and terminally ill. I imagine waking up and feeling again. Breathing, blinking, twitching. "Nurse, water please," I would say, sluggishly, my vocal cords just reawakening after a long slumber in the land on the brink of death. Then the doctor rushes in, shouting about miracles and thanking god. I smile, and i can feel it, thousands of sensations pouring back into my restless, weak body. Sight, touch, smell, taste, and sounds all returning at once.

I imagine i would begin to cry as all of my perceptory friends came back at once, excusing their absence. The memory of the taste of tears gives me hope.

         However, i realize the truth is probably closer to me laying in a coffin under six feet of hot georgia dirt in the summer. Bees and grasshoppers bouncing about on my grave, stopping for a moment to pay respects, then jumping back into nature without realizing I'm still awake under them.

         My brain, small twitches of electrical deja vu passing through, is probably my home. Just a dead brain, living out it's extended last moments before shrinking into dust. No eyes or ears or tongue to judge time or space with, so it wanders until it finally dies.

A dying, wandering, confused mind. A chicken with it's head cut off, waiting to bleed out once and for all, none the wiser.

         Maybe one day i'll wake up in that hospital. Or maybe one day my mind, my world of emptiness, will finally give way to decomposition and this will all end. Or, perhaps, something else will begin. Be it heaven, hell, or purgatory, or reincarnation, or becoming one with gaia or just anything other than this. I'm more than ready.

         Until that day, i will be here in this unfathomable lack of something. Playing ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, remembering apples and cars and peanuts and trees, stomping my own footprints in the snow, and singing "row, row, row your boat" into the nothing until it all slips away...

Yet, after all, there has to be something  more...

Hasn't there?

Row, Row, Row Your Boat
         Gently Down The Stream
                   Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily
                             Life Is But A Dream.