Day 270 Love and Death

I just watched “Love and Mercy” yesterday, about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.  Very tender movie.  The guy was a musical genius according to the movie.  Touching and fulfilling at the same time.  You really want to root for the guy all through the movie.  Beat up by his dad as a kid because he was the oldest or something like that.  He suffered mental illness all the while and was taken advantage of by a psychiatrist as an adult that tried to control him through meds.  Pretty much did too but was thankfully stopped by a love interest of Brian’s.  Yay the good people win!  Now how can I turn this around to me?

Hmm…well I’m going off of my meds as Brian did but for much less dramatic reasons and circumstances.  I don’t have a psychiatrist controlling my every move.  But I’m not mega rich either.  I am going off of my meds and I don’t think it’s a day too soon.   I’m moving meditation into the fore front of my treatment and pushing medication back to voodoo status.  It’ll be like starving my brain during and after.  It’s been in a chemically controlled soup for so long it won’t know what to do or how to react when the well has dried up.  It’s already affecting my sleep big time.  I think I can fall asleep now but I wake up way to early.  This morning it was 3AM.  I don’t leave my bed, I give my body a chance to rest and just let my head go to town.  But it’s tedious and tiring after a while.  I get saucy at work because of the weariness and I don’t like how I feel.   I don’t want to take meds for sleep as I’m trying to get out of that merry go round for good.  It’s another test of hitting 60 that I’m going through.

I forget sometimes that this is what this blog is about.  Hitting 60.  Turning 60.  The land of death is so much closer now than it’s ever been.  I haven’t heard from my son in a while and I think, “Hey I might not be around that much longer, you better get your dad time in now!”  But I don’t trip on him with my mind train.  I found out 2 people that I know died this week.  This is what happens when you get closer to the grey haze, people around start dying.  Well one was an overdose, tragic and the other was a heart attack.  That’s more like it.  Both tragic deaths and both so unexpected.  I wonder if I’ll know in some way that I’m gone.  Do you think there’s an afterlife?  I didn’t get that impression when my dad died in the same small room with me.  But I was too upset to pick up on any telltale signs of afterlife then.  Is it just as simple as checking out and its lights out?  No conscious thought anymore, just flat line and that’s it.  Part of the miracle of life is not what we think happens after life.  It’s all right now, what’s going on in the here and now and that’s it.  In some weird way you may live on in other’s memories but there is no spark, no spunk, no speaky anymore.  You don’t get the satisfaction of seeing how you impacted others at your funeral or just to see who shows up at your funeral.  Maybe that’s the reason, its bad enough you’re dead, and you don’t want to go out on any potential lifelong resentments.

I went to a wake a while back.  It was pretty cool but I thought that once it’s over, for the people intimately involved, it’s over.  There’s no more parties, dinners, movies, talks, walks, no more memory generating events to build on, dream about, mull over, it’s all over.  It’s just memories and pictures here on out.  It struck me as very sad.  I almost don’t want to have a wake for that reason.  Just let the dead be and don’t drudge up anything to make them alive again.  It’s even weird to think of my wake.  What would be the theme?  What part of me would be remembered?  I don’t even see my son anymore so what old memories would he be celebrating?  I don’t have a girlfriend so there’s no one intimately close that would be the master of ceremony.  Just old acquaintances reliving parts of me that have been dead a long time already.  So I am dead now, way before my scheduled wake.  According to my logic that is.  I’m not making suicide noises here I’m just stating facts about an old man’s situation.  I still have a lot of living to go before I kick the final bucket.  I’m just tripping on tradition.  I guess I could have a wake on Facebook, I’m more current on there than with anyone else.  I mean, who am I?  Do they try to figure it out at your wake?  Is that when your life gets summed up and played out?  Pictures at various times of your life on display next to cake and cookies? 

There should be a play.  From the moment you’re born until the moment you die.  The music would be the music that you grew up with, what made an impact on you.  The parents you were stuck with, the wasted teenage years, the lost 20’s, the sober 30’s, the marriages, the child, and the non-stop train of work that you go or went to every fucking day.  How did that shape the person you turned out to be?  Legends won’t be carved out of your stay on the planet but maybe one or two people will remember that you were a good guy after all.  A good guy.  A good guy at the end, sitting on a stool with a solitary spot light until you just fade away.  The measure of who you are left in the thoughts of those who survived you. And how long does that last?  I’m just putting it out there as food for thought.  It is what is in my alive mind now and this is the guy that I am now, right now.