::End Times

Mortality is vying for my attention this month.  Ugly stuff.

Last week, I was at McDonald’s for lunch when a feeble old woman lost her balance and crashed to the tile, not ten feet from me, her cane skittering across the floor.  It was a busy lunchtime and people swarmed all around immediately.  I didn’t get up – not because I was unwilling to help, but because I am exceptionally large and was very scruffy-looking that day.  Growing out my beard again, and I have to suffer through three weeks of looking like a homeless bum before it fills out properly.  I didn’t want to startle her any more than she already was, and there were plenty of respectable folk about.

Anyway, I ended up with an unwilling ringside seat to this poor woman’s plight.  The shaking, the fear, the embarrassment.  Strangers all staring.  The crowd unsure if it was safe to get her up, to move her at all.  Someone brought a chair.  Her voice was thin, quavery.  Ten minutes before they finally decided not to call an ambulance.  I left when they were trying to reach a relative on the phone to pick her up, because she was afraid to drive.  Shaking fingers and quivering limbs and fear.  Is that what I’ve got to look forward to?

And I come home and look in the mirror and every now and then, think I see a hint of gray hiding at my temples.  A softening in the cheeks.  My first wrinkle, at the jut of my chin where my beard is quietly sneaking in to conceal.

It’s only a matter of time, and that repulses me.

Then, unexpectedly, someone I went to high school with died.  He married one of my high school sweethearts and they had a great 17ish years together.  He had his gall bladder out, and they found some spots of cancer on and near his liver.  The first dose of chemotherapy shut down his kidneys and he was gone five days later.  I had spoken to him maybe three times since high school, but I went to the funeral anyway, to show respect and to support his wife.  She is in a tough spot, but all I can do is be a shoulder to cry on. 

He was shrunken and pale in the casket, and the Jesus-whisperer they brought in may have been the worst public speaker I’ve ever heard.  But they opened the floor for his friends to speak and wow, not a dry eye in the house was had.  I learned more about him in that half-hour than I’d heard in the past ten years, and I was moved.  I wondered if anyone would give a speech like that for me.  Wondered what I would leave behind and if they’d stick me in a box, surrounded by flowers in a pale beige parlor with a Jesus-whisperer I’d never met muttering grammatically incorrect platitudes about the Good Samaritan.  Or if I’d matter enough that a blood-brother would stand up and shed tears, and declaim my virtues and state that the world was darkened by my passing.

It’s only a matter of time, and that terrifies me.

I think of my father, and know that if I follow in his footsteps, I’ve got nine years left.  Nine years.  It can’t go slowly enough.  I have books to read and dice to roll and games to play and tits to grab and sunsets to watch and places to visit and books to write.

Not enough time.

It’s been hard to push aside.  Death panics me.  When I consider its inevitability, I get awful, dropping-out sensations in my gut and stay up all night in cold sweats, holding in sobs.  I want there to be something after, but the veil between is apparently impenetrable.  I’ve never seen the shade of my father or anyone else.  God hasn’t made himself plain to me and I don’t have faith.  If there is a deity there to take my hand, I’ll gladly cling to him with both of mine and start asking questions – but until then I’m full of fear that it will be a click of the lightbulb, and everything I am will end. 

—-

Making it a little easier to forget:  the coming joys of August.  Football season and Gen Con.

I started dreaming about being at the stadium a few days ago.  It’s a dreamtime version of the Fieldhouse… the geography’s not quite right and the lighting is odd, but I know in the dream it’s supposed to be the same place.  And my dream was all sunlight and anticipation, finding my seat and flirting with pretty girls and waiting for the games to begin.

Most of my friends don’t really understand my lust for football.  And that’s okay.

I try to explain it like this:  what gets you excited enough to jump up and down and yell and scream and wave your hands?   Your church?  A political candidate?  How about your favorite band, ever?   Now imagine if your Favorite Band Ever played a show where it was a COMPETITION.  And they could win or lose.  And there was a concert EVERY WEEK where they could whip the shit out of some other crappy band that you hate.  And there was a big tournament at the end, a battle of the bands.  And if your band won, that would mean they were the Best Band in the Land and you and everyone that loved them would be irrevocably validated and Right Forever.  Suddenly that would MATTER to you.  You’d identify with them.  You’d be frothing at the mouth and painting yourself colors and chanting battle songs and waiting, waiting, waiting for kickoff.   Yeah, that’s me.

Also, Gen Con in two weeks.  Geek Mecca, a week’s vacation.  Games and friends and food trucks and drinking and costumes and piles and piles of awesome.  I can’t wait to get away from my job and all my responsibilities and just PLAY for a few days.  I’ll play extra hard for those who couldn’t come this year.  Who won’t be coming at all, ever again.