Last words

For the last week, I’ve been obsessed with death. Not in that cute way my teenage-self was obsessed, where I dressed all in black, listened to the Cure on repeat and wrote poems that tried to find different rhymes for “rain” and “pain,” or in that annoying way where young people drink energy drinks and ride their snowboards out of helicopters onto a jet ski on fire. But rather in that scary grown-up way, where the cloaked spectre of death haunts my mind and drives me insane…in the rain.

But I’m not fearing the death of people I really love and cherish, like my mom or my cats or that guy at the video store who waived my late fees last week. Nor am I hoping for the early expiration of people I hate, like that 12-year-old in Colorado who kept taunting me while playing Modern Warfare 2 online (you’ll get your comeuppance NuggetzRule_1997!). No, I’m thinking more about my own death.

Maybe it’s because I went to that Bodies exhibit a few weeks ago and the sight of skinned, plastinated Asians got my existential undies in a knot. Or maybe I’ve been watching way too many zombie movies and making too many zombie-pocalypse preparations and putting the final personal touches on my spiked zombie-stick. Or maybe it’s because I have been waffling on getting vaccinated and have recently caught a cold and am now convinced that I have swine flu and that it’s too late to get vaccinated because if I did, the virus would mutate into a super-pig virus and they would whisk me away to a decontamination facility where scientists in hazmat suits would spray me with weird powders and blast me with a fire hose, which is both frightening and frighteningly arousing. Or maybe I’m just feeling old.

But for whatever reason, death is on my mind. How will I go out? Will it be with a bang, doing something insane like trying to make a green light on my motorcycle so that I can hit the ramp at the proper speed and jump over those 20 buses to win the prize money that saves that orphanage from the evil land developers? Or will it be with a whimper and far off into the future, where I’ll just slip peacefully into oblivion as an old man whose head has been poorly grafted onto a sex robot?

And how will I be remembered? Will it be for my many successes? Like when I won that gold medal for weightlifting in the Olympics? Or for my failures? Like at the same Olympics when I tested positive for doping but made a stink because I don’t understand how genetically fusing yourself with gorilla DNA counts as “doping?” I think, in the end, I’d like to be remembered simply: as just an average guy, from an average town, whose experimental genetic make-up gave him the sexual prowess of a superhero whose power was “totally pleasing women.”

One thing I do know is that I don’t think I want to be buried. Especially if I’m dead. What happens if we go into the next life the same way we leave this one? I don’t want to spend eternity trapped in a box. Nor would I want to be cremated and spend eternity on fire all the time. No one would high five me and trying to eat ice cream would be really annoying. I’d rather donate my body to one of those plastination exhibits and have them pose me doing what I loved doing when I was alive: playing badminton, riding a motorcycle and laughing at old people trying to dance. I’m also pretty sure I don’t want to have my funeral in a church, since I only ever really went to church to sing and drink wine, which is incidentally the only reason I go to karaoke. I’d rather have something more festive, like an Irish wake. There’d be whiskey a-flowin’ and people a-singin’ and close friends a-eulogisin’ and probably lots of super hot models a-fightin’ about who was my favourite.

Maybe my funeral could be an event where, through an elaborate system of holograms and animatronics, it looks like I come back from the dead so that I could find out who really loved me and who was just faking it and talking shit behind my back. Then it would build up to a fever pitch until my assistant would reveal that it was all just a practical joke and serve everybody tea and everyone would sit around complaining what a jerk I was for doing that. But I would have the last laugh because—ha-ha!—the tea is made out of me.

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA