By Michael Jewell
Would Walt Whitman have home-schooled his kids? These are the kinds of things I think about at 1 a.m., leaning out my bedroom window for a cigarette. It’s one of the very few pleasant bad habits I’ve acquired in order to occasionally spit in the face of death. For someone as neurotically fixated on sickness, disease and decay as I am, smoking the odd butt can approximate a healthy activity.
Whether by brain aneurism or freak falling piano, death delights in the unexpected. In mankind’s partial victory over nature, the reaper likes to pop in occasionally in ways that remind us how cruel, senseless and completely random he is. Some people hold near-death experiences, where they are given a brief glimpse of oblivion, as epiphanous. I say that’s rubbish. Either you die or you don’t. In the shadow of the unplanned for, every microsecond that my cells continue to reproduce is a near-death experience.
I recently decided to lead my life in order to avoid old age. Specifically, the senile, incontinent frailty that comes to those like me who hate logic puzzles and loathe exercise. A visit to relatives in nursing facilities is like a grim vision of six decades into my future. Fancy me in hospital scrubs. Better yet, fancy me on a respirator. Not pretty. I’d like to imagine myself a sprightly octogenarian with a salt-and-pepper beard and the lust for life still in my eyes, but this outcome is hardly likely. Alzheimer’s ravages my genes, and the tightly regimented lifestyle of bland food, working out and lots of coffee where coffee shouldn’t go is like a self-imposed version of the miserable senility that a healthy lifestyle strives to avoid. What’s the point of inordinately prolonging a colorless, highly-scheduled lifespan? The demented Victorian “health and wellness” fad of Dr. J.H. Kellogg and co. has resurfaced in the 2000s in the form of vitamin-boosted juice bars and the loathsome raw food diet, and I will have no part of it.
I’ve lead a very cushioned life. As a kid, I was a picky eater, something I recognize now as an extravagant luxury. What’s more, I suck on the occasional cigarette because I want to, not because I need a cheap way to ease hunger pangs. The closest my life ever got to real mortal danger was when mosquitoes carrying the West Nile Virus overtook my native state of Arkansas. This was death in its sheer random awfulness visiting my comfortable suburb in the tiniest biting insect. A mosquito’s bite is so insignificant that it doesn’t even trigger a pain receptor, yet its poison is the cause of endless human suffering.
Iron Maiden sings “only the good die young, only evil seems to live forever.” Sometimes. Who knows? I’m using my one turn at the wheel to love, to give and accept pleasure freely and to leave this world in better shape than I found it. Life is precious. Life is precious. Life is precious.
