I'm terrified of being old only slightly less than I fear being dead.
I don't want to wander around a department store, repeating the same six details of how I had to make a toilet-paper sanitary seat in a different store's bathroom a month ago as if this were knowledge worth disseminating to an impossibly tolerant forty-something year-old sales associate who isn't quite sure what I want to buy, but can't risk letting me get lost and forget where I am in a tearful moment of complete animal panic.
There aren't many things I think I'd rather be dead than, but that coupled with forty or so years of celibacy and nothing to discuss but reality television, is a fate too grim to envision.
........
I'm pretty near done with graduate school. Just a twenty-page essay and then all that's left is the hand-shaking and hat-tossing.
What's next? Indeed.
Preemptive congratulations on having successfully put off the real world for a while. I hope it all goes smoothly.
ReplyDeleteAlso, what's next should be a cross country roadtrip in which you stop in Denver to visit me, and then head out to San Francisco to visit Marie. It's a great plan, because, 1) Denver, 2) San Francisco, 3) awesome lady friends. Also, I guess 4) mountains and 5) sea lions.
Re: your post - I don't want to be old (stairs are going to be a challenge? what the hell is that about?), either.
But I don't mind the idea of being dead. Because I won't know about it. Since I'll be dead. But I am terrified of that moment right before death, when you know you're dying and that your next breath will be the last one.
Anyway, don't mess up by tossing hands and shaking hats.
I had considered writing "becoming dead" rather than "being dead," but I sacrificed accuracy for rhetorical symmetry, by which I mean I agree whole-heartedly with your point — although, thinking about it now, while I still accept the validity of not fearing "death" in that it's a thing one can not experience, I also think that part of my dread (during my being alive time) relates to my not existing (when I am dead), which is to say that the becoming dead part, as much as it's going to suck (and I trust that it will), will at least be an experience. As a thing which causes me anxiety, a horrible experience I'm not yet experiencing seems slightly less harrowing than the nothingness I'll be not ever experiencing.
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