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« It’s the Pictures That Got Small | Main | Inadequacy at 35,000 Feet »

August 26, 2005

Comments

I don't want to know, either, but I have to admit that I enjoy The Death Clock.

I still haven't embarked on Season 2 of SFU, but I don't mind the spoilers. I've been reading about each episode this season and it only makes me look forward to actually seeing the shows.

Danny,

I have it on good authority that looking to a Ouija board for good information is the equivalent to looking for a good potential husband in a Barstow bar around 10 AM. So please, consider the source!

I think that atheism actually pushed me much closer to accepting my mortality. Drinking helps, though.

I lost someone I was living with in 2000. (He actually died in my home.) About two weeks later, I had to have an x-ray of my ribs because I had bruised or strained them and the doctor thought they might be cracked. I stared at the x-ray and thought, "how little I am, how fragile that I'm just these small bones". For several months after that, I kept looking at people and seeing their inner structure, how fragile they were, how quickly things can change.

Now, years later, I still sometimes will see a row of people at a bar or standing in line for something and I'll be struck with that momentary mortality thought but then I am also struck by the fact that we're all here at the same time "enjoying the moment" and somehow, it all makes a weird sort of sense. Mortality, I think, is the thing that keeps us honest, the thing that allows us to honor the importance of glasses clinking together in a toast to good health, good times, and, yes, love.

I take a weird comfort in the evident fact that "it's never what you think." Like, you obsess and worry about cancer for 50 years and then drop dead of a heart attack? Only even more far out than that. Something seems bound and determined to frustrate our fantasies and expectations and suprise us with something totally out of left field, as to when and what. This makes me feel that there's no point in thinking about it, since whatever we think is going to be wrong anyway. It's kind of like, don't worry too much about how you look, because you can have no idea. That's not your business, it's other people's business. Forget about it. There's some comfort in the way the time and manner of our death is, um, shrouded from us. The "Six Feet Under" episode was shocking and upsetting not only because it violated the hiddenness, but it violated the unimaginableness -- it was a kind of lie, imagining that which cannot be imagined and therefore cannot possibly be correct. Am I making any sense?

Oh Danny,
I thought I was the only one still reeling from the Six Feet Under episode. Gary and I were both sobbing when all those deaths flashed by. There was something so stunning, so awful in the original sense of awe-inducing, to see time speeded up and every character we've loved come to a complete end. It was sad and scary, and horrible to see those dates of birth and death. I "read" those deaths as being true, but one critic writing about the show interpreted them as Claire's fantasy since they were juxtaposed with her drive to NY. I read them as being real and found it so painful to watch. There was something really deep about seeing them contrasted with her move out of ambivalence into an unknown future. Still I couldn't decide if it was great art or a cheap shot, but I often felt that way about the show. And yes, I too keep seeing everyone around me at 80, and imagining all the ways that we all might die. Thanks for writing about this.

I'm right with you, Danny. The final episode was disturbing, deeply so. I briefly mentioned it at my blog, failing to really explain my horror - the images that propelled me into depression: The eyes of old Claire turning back into young Claire, the image of young and beautiful Keith at David's death. Those two images, scenes, haunted me all night. Oh...and the length of time since Nate's passing - how meaningless he life seemed by the time Claire died! I was suddenly back in high school, reading Camus, and asking the question, "Why bother with anything at all? We are meaningless, we're nothing."

Ack! I'm going to smoke an imaginary joint now.

Ironically, I'm comforted...at least I know I'm not alone in my "illness."

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