what to do after you die
The stories are out there. Everywhere. The world is full of fall-out from the follow-your-bliss train. Exhausted, baffled people everywhere, devotees of the church of good faith, broad-sided by the painful truth that devotion and good faith are no guarantee of anything.
I say, let yourself off the hook for the whole damned thing, let everyone else go too, and just say ‘oh well.’ These are wise words offered to me once by an over-achiever. This is what you say when you fuck up or lose; an antidote for the moments when you get whacked by life and all mundane human failings are revealed. It's not intuitive and sounds "soft" to many but it's well worth a whirl.
So your whole damned life plan didn’t pan out. Oh well. So you devoted yourself completely, as wholly as your awareness allowed along the way, and it doesn’t seem like the world reached back at ya’. Oh well. So you did some great work and some got out there into the world, or maybe none did, but you’ve got so much potential that is still burning within the tips of your fingers, yet to find a route out. Oh well. You don’t have to scrap the whole thing. Just pick up your pen, guitar, back-hoe, potter's wheel or other vehicle of expression up and make something, anything - make one bad sound or one lopsided bowl. Be a suddenly enlightened being or be scared as a mother fucker as the case may be, but throw your energy into taking one action toward what you really want to do. Just do it despite everything.
I remember the moment when I realized that no matter how smart I was, how limber, strong, resilient I was, my ways of navigating the world were no longer working, and it pissed me off. All my strengths were suddenly revealed as liabilities, every last one of them. The anxiety poured over me and I was suddenly and overwhelmingly drowning in the thin blood of my own anemic compassion. Suddenly my zen-like calm, my understanding that people are only assholes because they are suffering bastards who don’t know what to do with the bile imploding in their gut so they spit it out on everyone in their general vicinity and therefore can be observed with fascinated detachment so that they mulch into wonderful fodder for developing character (mine) and writing stories (mine); my unconditional love of humanity and lack of concern for most things material; it all just boomeranged around and whacked me in the ass.
At the time, I remember thinking of it this way: It was great that I played my instrument so well, but who was playing? And if you can’t answer that with even a guttural grunt, then what the fuck does the playing mean? I’ll tell you what it means. It means it is meaningless. It has nothing to say. It may be a true expression of longing, but from a soul whose freezing and doesn’t know it. The person inside is dead. I had died at the hands of one of those suffering bastards, namely my grandfather, at the age of two or earlier, (my memory only goes back so far), and came back for more again and again because he and my grandma were also so loving. I came back, a moth to his frightful and all-encompassing flame.
His hands were like a big eraser. Each time he touched me, he erased more of me. He made himself so clear, he painted a picture so suffocatingly pure, of what his psyche looked like, of what he needed from me and what he needed me to be, that I became it. Instantly and obediently and at each moment, one more part of me disappeared, replaced bit by bit with another Borg-like prosthesis, until the whole person was annihilated, limbs floating into the ether to be reassembled one-by-one, so many years later and only at the behest of an unnamed anxiety that boiled up from nowhere. I knew they were my limbs, though I didn’t quite recognize them and I was scared to introduce myself.
Once they came to reclaim me, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. At a certain point, I remember weeks and months of having to run, demolish things, chop wood endlessly; bug-eyed, heart pounding like a speed freak, just to exhaust myself into an endorphin-inspired state of calm. I chopped the whole fucking woodshed down, as a matter of fact. Good thing the landlady didn’t mind, because that thing was history in no time, and in good service to the embryonic seed of sanity that had just begun to grow in my gut. I whacked and whacked. I also punched the body bag that my roommate Mike had hung on the tamarack in the lower yard of our heavenly abode in Topanga Canyon
Thank god for that canyon and that house that had become the rubber room that could hold me as I began to molt without a clue what was happening or what was underneath. That beautiful, calm place that cradled me until the first moment I was ever asked, "Did anyone ever touch you without you wanting them to?..." at which moment I responded, "Well, not really. I mean my grandpa was kind of, well... it wasn’t that bad…" I had finally reached the beginning.
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