A Few Random Thoughts On the Subject of Death

When I first understood what death was and that it was inevitibly going to happen to me, I became very angry at my parents. "You mean, you knew this is what would happen and you brought me here anyway? How dare you people?"

My favorite stuffed animal was a small Pink Panther I received for Christmas when I was five. He was plagued by self-loathing and ennui and routinely attempted suicide by flinging himself off the top of my chest-of-drawers. Numerous surgeries, extended hospital stays and painful physical therapy always restored him, but he would inevitibly try it again.

The first boy I kissed was a friend of my brother's and he did it on a dare. He later went on to become valedictorian of his class as well as a wildly successful drug runner around the greater Tarrant, AL area. Until, of course, he was gunned down outside of a crack house in Inglenook. He kissed me in my family's van on the way home from Six Flags.

Watership Down was, and still is, my favorite movie. The violence and dark symbolism was deliciously disturbing, but the ending where Hazel quietly lies down and passes away after a long, happy life was the most frightening thing I had ever seen. It introduced me to thought that I will probably never feel that I have had enough of life.

The last thing I said to my grandmother over the phone before she died was, "It's going to be ok." She responded, "I don't think it is."

My friend Ari told me that I am the kind of person who will be freaked out by turbulence because I don't know whether or not it means the plane is going down. However, if it turned out that, yes, the plane is going down I would probably relax...because at least I'd know what was going to happen. I am inclined to agree with this, but I don't want to test it out.

Ever since I was a kid, I have occasionally had panic attacks while lying in bed thinking about dying. I imagine that it's like going to sleep, only you have no dreams, can't move, and there's just this tiny grain of awareness that you're dead. I would obsess over that thought until I'd jump up and run across the room to get away from it, and then go back and go to sleep. A few years ago, I duped myself into being comforted by one baseless, abstract philosophical point — if death was like going to sleep, at some point you must wake up — and for about three months it stopped the panic attacks. Boom...I'm a genius.

Sometimes I find that my mind wanders without my noticing, and before long I've spent 30 minutes thinking about some movie I saw in the 80s. I'm pretty sure that when I die, my last thought will be of Brewster's Millions. "It's not an asset anymore, he's mailed it!"

Yesterday I was on the subway next to a guy from California who has been in New York for a week. He hates the subway, hates walking, hates the cold, hates the crowds, feels constantly lost and misses his car. He explained that he never minded being stuck in traffic because at least in a car you can turn the heat up. I responded that on the subway you get to know your fellow man, an idea he immediately dismissed. This morning I shared the train with a class of 12-year-olds on a field trip with their teacher and chaperones. They were going to some kind of debate about politics and they were divided into three groups: justices, the government and the press. The teacher instructed them to discuss their strategies for the days' events, which they did with gusto. Eventually, a member of the government group, a little bespectacled boy named Orlando, sat down next to me. He was reading the dictionary and had it opened to a page that ended with the word myriad. This made me think of the film Heathers and how J.D. and Veronica used the word myriad in Heather Chandler's suicide note, "as a symbol of her failings at school." Sitting next to Orlando, all of my feelings of jealousy over his youth disappeared and I just wanted to hug him because he was quiet and smart and riding the subway like a champ.

When I die, I want to wake up in New York in October and drink coffee while walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with Spalding Gray and Marlon Brando. It can even be the fat Marlon, I'm not picky.