For the record

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.

Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

John Donne

Fight or flight

It's easy for me to say, and believe, that I would fight to stay alive if I knew I was dying. I'm sitting here in a comfortable chair and not feeling any pain.

When I was twenty-two, I went into the hospital to have a brain tumor surgically removed. I'd been living with it, and enduring pain, for years. By the time I went onto the table, and felt them popping the anesthesia into my spine, I was so tired I didn't care if I woke up or not.

When I did wake up, I woke up without any fear of death. I don't know why. I felt like I had a brief experience with not existing, and realized that it was kind of nice in its own way. It wasn't painful. And it wasn't boring.

I do still have fears... and dangerous situations are still scary. But I don't fear death anymore - I don't fear not existing. I think it's because I can imagine what it's like now. I expect it will be fairly comfortable.

The transition, however... the letting go. The trading of life for death, that's still a slightly scary notion to me. If I could choose, I think I'd choose to go on drugs as well. Mushrooms and Morphine (or, even better, Stadol), in a forest meadow on a warm autumn day, surrounded by impossibly bright colors, beneath a parade of clouds, all of which look like types of animals.

Weird phobias No. 423

Ceiling Fans. That's my destiny.

It must be something to do with my nascent distrust of engineering standards, but everytime I'm under a ceiling fan, I'm thinking about how thoroughly it was attached to the ceiling, whether or not the installer was having an off day / doing drugs / suffering through a painful breakup / just plain nasty. It also strikes me that if you're in a hotel or apartment complex, the lowest bidder probably got the ceiling fan contract. I do understand that it would be detrimental to their future sales to have a customer beheaded by the whirling dervish of death - but maybe they figure these things in like a car company deciding to recall a model only after .x percent of fatal crashes.

I don't want to persuade anyone to join my nasty little phobia support group, and in the interests of full disclosure, just let me state that I have recently installed ceiling fans in my house.

There's a wall out there somewhere...

I have a recurring vision of myself hitting a brick wall at such high velocity that my body is pulverized, like a great big grasshopper smashed onto the windshield of a pickup truck. I don’t know why this vision occurs to me, nor can I control it. It just happens, suddenly and frequently. I don’t know if this is a vision of how I will die, or a visual manifestation of feeling out of control. But it’s interesting to me that I’m not falling in this vision. I’m flying. And then splat. The vision ends with a sound, rather than an image: a barely audible breath – exhaled – like a soft sigh of relief.

I don’t want to know death. I’m content in my ignorance of it. When my time comes, I will have to be pushed out of this womb of Earth amid curses and screams. It will be painful and it will be messy. I will not be delivered peacefully into the arms of oblivion. I will be gasping for my first breath of eternity and kicking any and all who are there to receive me.

Assassinate me

I want to be assassinated. A single bullet from a lone gunman (not necessarily on a grassy knoll) entering my skull and painting the surroundings an interesting colour called hint of brains.

My reasoning: Being assassinated would assume that someone thought me and my rather subversive thoughts important enough to do something about. I would have to be famous - this wouldn't be a random act of violence, you understand. Rather, it would be the result of careful panning, lots of money, secretive meetings between powerful people behind closed doors,, expensive, state-of-the-art ordnance, false passports, payoffs, the mob, whatever.