Catch a Falling Star

So, as I was playing with this post, I began to realize that Alan Watts is really the one wizard whose ultimate philosophy spell is cast with these words;

The whole purpose of being alive is…

Simply to be ALIVE. -Alan Watts, wiseguy wizard

I have been shouting into the stormwinds of late because… well, because I don’t have very much longer to live. Don’t get me wrong. I am not suddenly diagnosed with cancer and doomed to die next Thursday at 3 o’clock. But I am old. I have had arthritis for 48 years, diagnosed when I was 18. I have had diabetes for 23 years, diagnosed in Spring of 2000. I have four other relatively serious incurable diseases and conditions not even counting the fact that I survived cancer in 1983, malignant melanoma. Every morning I wake up alive now is a significant effort to get up and going, as well as being a miraculous escape from the clutches of the inevitable.

Well, far be it for me to question Master Alan Watts. But even though I am suffering daily, I am living in the here and now, making plans to look forward to, letting go any anger and blame I have against anyone for injustices against me in the past (Don’t worry. I don’t mean I have forgiven Don Cheetoh Trumpalonely.) And I am enjoying life in spite of the pain and difficulty. It is a Nietzschean appreciation for how the dark parts and the hard parts make the sunshine sweeter.

I live my life, I play with my toys, I enjoy my crayons and colored pencils (the crayons are particularly chewy, but the red ones don’t taste like cherries,) and I remember childhood by reliving it a second time.

“I am not dead yet,” said the 66-year-old little boy with the red crayon in his mouth.

It’s easy to explain how… You just can’t…

But nonsense is a rubbery sort of sense. You can pull it like taffy, wind it around your neck, let it harden into one of those neck rings like some of those African women who put on more and more neck rings until their neck bones separate and they can never again take the neck rings off because they will die of a broken neck if they do.

That’s probably a racist joke. Although it is not really a joke, but more of a surrealistic observation. They really do wear those neck rings. The Ndebele tribe from the Transvaal Region of South Africa wear these things sometimes even without being in a Black Panther movie in the MCU. In Black Panther movies they are worn by the Dora Milaje who protect the Black Panther. And the words “Dora Milaje” mean the “Adored Ones.” And you have to adore them, or else they might kick your butt, or even break it into three pieces. They are very tough and determined ladies.

And then there’s the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. He wears crazy stuff too. But if he tried to join a nudist organization and become a nudist, he would disrobe and suddenly be transformed into a small haystack of straw. And what would that look like? A straw pile with two little white eyeballs laying at the peak of the pile?

And obviously that could be a racist joke too. But what race would we be running? And how slow would you have to be to be beaten in a race by a naked straw man?

But straw men are even more discriminated against than other men, nude or not. You see, politicians are constantly setting them up because when you are arguing with the other party, they are easy to knock down with your superior arguments. But, of course, the Democrats are always easier to knock down anyway, because they don’t rely on made-up facts and scare tactics. They only try to scare you with true stuff. And they are more likely to start wondering what a naked strawman would look like.

And then you take the rubbery nonsense and wind it all around the parts of this picture. It has a lot of real things in it, yet most of those things are not really real. Like Mickey Mouse. He’s real. I mean, there’s a real guy or girl inside the hot costume. But the outside is not really real. And you would be hard pressed to actually see the really real guy inside the suit because it is really hard to see what’s hidden inside a costume if it is currently in a colored-pencil drawing. In fact, Cissy Spasek is in the picture, but as the character who kills everybody in the movie Carrie. So, which part of that is most real? Carrie is a real book by Stephen King. And how many real people are in this picture? And how many fake people? That’s the thing about nonsense… It doesn’t make any sense.

I am waking up every morning amazed that I am still alive. Pain is a constant. Feeling ill from diabetes is a second constant. Too many constants in the equation means you can work out the math and predict the date you will have to play chess with the Grim Reaper again.

Fortunately for me, old Grimmy hasn’t figured out the King’s Indian defense that I learned in 1972 by reading Bobby Fischer’s column about chess in Boys’ Life Magazine. He falls for the Knight’s Gambit every single time we play.

I confess to being overly obsessed with death lately. That may have been partly due to promotions for the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 that seemed to point to beloved characters dying in what was said to be the last movie in the trilogy. Well, they did almost die… but (Spoiler alert!) Nobody I cared about actually died. Not Rocket Raccoon, not Drax the Destroyer, nor Peter Quill’s Starlord character as well.

Even more, it seemed my writing results were indicating future writer doom. My blog activity was down. Book sales are down. When I die, nobody will have read and loved the works of novel art that I have been pouring my life’s blood into for over a decade. My stories will cease to be, unread and forgotten even by my relatives.

I haven’t even been able to write the usual 500 words a day for over two weeks. But, then, I cut back on Instagram activity, and voila! (a fancy French word that means, “There it is!”) I was able to write a blog post and write more on my book of essays as well.

So, maybe I have been obsessing about death too much. But I do find it useful as motivation for the limited number of things lazy old me still does to think that todary is the last day to get anything done. We shall see if I wake up deceased tomorrow or not.