Response: Existence is Futile
Actually Saint, I would point you in the direction of the Swahili word for self-awareness, "ufanyaji" (pronounced ooh-fawn-ya-gee), which funnily enough is now associated with a popular Tanzanian fruit drink. However, the word itself has much more sinister origins. According to Daniel Juergen's landmark 1976 treatise, Swahili: Deconstructing the History and Language of an African People, 700-1600, the term "ufanyaji" first appeared in the log books of Portugese slave traders around the turn of the 15th century. It could often be found scrawled on the walls of the stowage deck. But that's for another blog. And it's a complete lie.
My Own Private Idaho occurred in a much more recent time and place. In 1986, I was five years old. My favorite baseball team at the time was the California Angels, I wore an oversize Panama hat from the Bahamas everywhere I went, and I still, on occasion, wet the bed. That spring, my parents took me on my first snow-ski outing in Angel Fire, New Mexico. The entire week had been going swimmingly until suddenly, out of nowhere, smack dab in the middle of my mom's Famous Homemade Chili dinner, I realized that someday I would die. You would think I would have already learned that at such a relatively late stage. But no, it seems my brain cells were too clogged with GI Joe trivia and glue shrapnel. Up until that point, the worst news I had ever received was the diagnosis that my poodle had Irritable Bowel Syndrome. But I can't even begin to tell you the sheer horror of realizing I would not, in the words of Liam Gallagher, live forever. I cried for at least an hour, hurled obscenities at my parents when they tried to comfort me, and sank into a pit of self-loathing from which I thought I would never recover. I have since tried to replay that day over and over in my head, in the hopes of finding concrete evidence that I had in fact had a near death experience of some sort. Perhaps a terrible fall on the Bunny Slopes or a mild case of hypothermia induced me to reflect on the very thing I had been avoiding up to that point? But here we are 21 years later, and I still have no clue as to what prompted such a terrible and enduring moment of what I like to call "self-bewareness." In my most sobering moments though, I can trace back all of my life disappointments to that very day. Even now, when I eat chili, I ponder the fragility of human existence.
I am a person who worries almost constantly. But at the the root of every single one of my worries is that I will die. I mean really, if you reason out all of your own personal anxieties, you have to figure that at the core of each, is this constant fear of death. And there's no getting around it. You could be worried about giving a presentation in a room full of your peers, but really you're worried that you will "die of embarrassment." You could be worried that your family and friends will discover some awful secret about you, but really you're worried that you "die of shame." You could be worried about a serial killer living in your neighborhood, but really you're worried that you will, well, die of death. So faced with such constant trepidation, it's no wonder people resort to Owen Wilsonesque extremes. But you do have to keep it in perspective. With every year that goes by, I find myself thinking less and less about the Big D. Strange, isn't it? You would think the opposite would be true. However, the Ingmar Bergman Seventh Seal styled Grim Reaper of my youth has transformed himself into the affable Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey version. Most excellent huh?
I hope that the Super Giant Killer, like myself, and the Queen and the Saint before her, will take such monumental discoveries in stride. Life's too short to dwell too much on the infinite. Because, let's face it; we're never going to figure out why we're here, where we're going, or where we came from. And even if you could know, would you really want to? Well, I would, but only because I'm tired of worrying about it.
posted by A Contemporary Bunkshooter @ 9:43 PM,
1 Comments:
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At Wednesday, September 05, 2007 8:47:00 AM,
Adjective Queen said...
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I recently read through an interesting book about parenting without religion. It said that when your child starts freaking out about the fact that they will die one day, ask them if they remember never existing, because, up to the time they were conceived, they didn't exist.
That would've blown your mind big time, I think!
