We've got to stop thinking we're better than each other

When something happens like the thing that happened four years ago today, or what happened thirteen days ago today, you have to adjust to a new reality. Some things you thought you knew, you have to un-know, and that's hard to do. You have to replace them with new ideas about what your take is like. You can't go along thinking anymore the way you did.

I'm young, but I feel so cynical sometimes. I don't want to know the difference between innocence and ignorance, but I do.

When I was a kid and rode in cars I always watched the windshield to see how bugs got smashed on it. I was told at an early age by one of my many crazy uncles the stupid joke that goes, "Q: What's the last thing that goes through a bug's mind before he hits a windshield? A: His ass." (Yes, my uncles said "ass" around me when I was a small child. They also taught me how to hit a target with a crossbow, how to piss people off, and what not to say to your mother when she buys you a Christmas gift you don't like, all by example. It explains a lot about why I am who I am today.)

Tree-hugging hippie that I was, even at a young age, I was always offended at the wording of the joke, which never changed: "...before he hits a windshield." The bug doesn't hit the windshield. The windshield hits the bug. For God's sake. The bug is just minding his own business, and then he's obliterated. What really does go through a bug's mind? What is it like to go from conscious being to dead. ended. in the blink of an eye? It would take a microsecond for the bug to make that transition.

It's a bad analogy, but I thought about it on that day. You know, that blue blue day that everyone's posting about today. When the planes hit the towers, judging from the massive fireball, death was instantaneous for the people on board the planes (and on the particular floors of the buildings that the planes hit). Those people must have been vaporized, gone from traveling through the air at a terrifying rate of speed, to nothing. Gone. No trace of their corporeal existence but flames, which you can't pick up and touch and know.

Aside from the anticipatory terror of knowing you're going to die, the actual moment of death--the second your body stops housing your alive self--would that be a bad way to go? To move so fast from being to nothingness? You don't have time to fight for life. You don't have time to notice you're dying. You're just dead. You don't lie in the street dramatically clutching your chest where a bullet-hole wound pumps blood out of you. You don't stare wide-eyed your hospital-room ceiling and gasp for breath. You don't fight off a wretched and terrifying pain-haze of a heart attack. You don't die from giggity-giggity-giggity after looking at a Zhang Ziyi photo. You're just dead.

I've been waking up terrified in the night for the past couple days. I think I'm doing okay, and then I wake up and I am so scared that everything I think I know is wrong. It's scary. It's so scary. It's so solitary. It's like I'm the only one left--and I don't know what that means. The only what?

In the daylight, it seems trivial and meaningless and I forget it and I go on with my day. I went to visit my grandmother today. She's in good spirits, despite her poor bashed-up body. Her left hand is just amazingly gross looking. Lucky for all of you, the card-reader on my computer is temporarily not working, because I took a really disgusting macro shot of it when my ma was cleaning out the wound and putting on a new bandage, and you can bet I wanted to post the image.

Tonight after M went to bed at a reasonable hour like reasonable people do, and the house was dark, I was walking toward the computer to turn it on and I saw my backlit reflection in the framed Mandala print (kind of antithetical to the concept of a sand mandala, but I love to look at it anyway) we have in our living room--my silhouette, a dark shape against a light background that changed as I moved. And I got that feeling again. That terrifying, I am so fucked, oh God make this stop feeling. Luckily it only lasts for a few seconds, but after it goes, I'm left at the center of this pit of dark what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-with-my-life emotions.

I'm not going to write about those.

Instead I'm going to take a survey:

What do you think happens to you after your body dies?