I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
-Charles Bukowski
The passing years have left me with more memories than I can ever remember. Some I like, others I’d just as soon forget. As is the case with many though, I have forgotten far more than I will ever recall. That’s not unusual; most of life goes unrecorded by us; real time is always the wind / and every random stretch of sky is always everything else. We stare at the moment, the moment passes before our eyes. The moment is gone, never to return.
The inevitable reality, this collective agreement among the living that- as far as we humans can comprehend- we are born upon a ticking clock that will one day stop for us, keep going for others, is the definitive anchor to an otherwise runaway ghost ship. Just think of what life would be if we weren’t so intensely, so obnoxiously watched by Death and all his minions. When I was young, I was invincible, and the shadow of my ultimate fate made no attempt to ever connect with me as far as I can recall. Life seemed everywhere, especially inside of me, and the sun and the stars: I could taste them in the tepid dust of any afternoon unfolding. Or in the cool thin cracks of any evening coming down.
But death was nowhere to me right from the start. Having never witnessed a dead person with my own eyes, I might have been sheltered or shielded by my mom so as to never see a corpse. I don’t know exactly.
I’m not at all convinced it matters that much to me either.
Especially now, here and now in this day and age as I’m a month away from 52, halfway to 104. I keep looking back for the harbor where I set out from long ago, but it’s gone, man. Gone, gone gone. There’s nothing but sea out here. And when I spot some land again, then I’ll know what that means.
The end is nigh, motherfucker.