It’s Probably Me

I was five when I realised we were all going to die.

Lying in my nan’s spare bedroom, turning under sheets that itched all the way along my bald forearms, I became aware of my own mortality, and subsequently of everyone else’s. It was the second great revelation of my life, following my first erection – to Billy Idol’s ‘Cradle of Love’ video – though one that left me less pleasantly rigid. It was inescapable that I would pass, as would those I loved, those I reviled and those of whom I’d never be aware.

My fear receded, but the awareness remained. On the drive home that night, as our Mazda hatchback mounted each speed bump -‘Come Said the Boy’ playing softly as the steering wheel spun in dad’s hands – I knew this respite was palliative at best, and that we were all inextricably tethered to a fate we all acknowledged, but were never fully prepared for. Erections and epiphanies were to remain the two constants of my life.

Like everyone else, I still think about death, and am often unable to find anything beyond more questions. Indeed, having accepted that death is inevitable and the likelihood of being immortalized in the annals of human history is slim, each of us individually is faced with the question: “Why carry on?”

It could be argued that there’s not much point. Why continue to occupy a plane of existence riddled with breakfast radio DJs, ‘h’ pronounced as ‘haitch,’ children with HIV, adults with ankle tattoos and the ongoing misconception that we’re all inherently good? Of the billions of people who have passed through life before us, how many are remembered for anything more than a thousand years or so? To achieve even that requires the kind of aptitude for physics or ethnic cleansing that I am sadly lacking, despite my many fiery and irrevocable prejudices.

Because of this, nihilism used to make a lot of sense to me. It seemed redundant to love; to interact; to keep the belt looped around my pants and not the rafters when the denouement of it all was that we would be dust, and, in time, so would everything else. Drinking a bottle of gin and telling you I’d sooner set myself alight than go to your bestie’s calligraphy exhibition hardly seems as grave when you think that every day the universe is closer to concertinaing in upon itself.

Nothing matters.

In subscribing to this worldview, suicide becomes the only noble course. Give me a man, who, in accepting the casual austerity of the world, chooses to depart on his own terms over those who acknowledge we’re wasting our time, yet continue in spite of it, their every hour paving a path to the guillotine. I reject the premise altogether.

I may be a romantic, a coward or any other epithet you’d choose to apply, but I can’t bring myself to bake my head. Somewhere within my marrow is the insistent feeling that there’s something keeping us here. Perhaps I’m just forever hitting ‘snooze’ on an alarm that, soon enough will sound and send me spiralling to the epicentre of hell, clad in loose satin snoopy boxers and with sleep-encrusted eyelids, but mortality to me is a spur, not a sentence.

I don’t endorse a softheaded, mawkish ‘Magic Happens’ kind of life, but instead of snivelling behind sweeping questions of existence, I would suggest instead busying yourself with the minutiae and absurdity of your immediate surrounds. I read today of a tribe in New Guinea where boys are made to drink semen and receive anal sex, as the tribe’s belief system holds that jism is the key to vitality and burgeoning manhood. This is the kind of thing that keeps me smirking and alert, as does the ongoing hope that I may make a man of some impressionable filly’s abdomen over the weekend.

We’re not here long. Not much has been. Be it the Oak Lawn pissants, the Diplodocus skin fuelling your Peugeot, Hemingway with the shotgun between his thighs or white shoes in winter, everything will and does pass. Come to terms with it and make hay while your cerebellum shines.

You’ll always have the power outlet, the butterknife and the toaster, regardless.