what is about dying that invites thought-killing cliche? 

then again, isn’t it obvious? a cliche is mental morphine. nothing like the slow drip of an “i never saw it coming” or a “life flashing before my eyes” to make you melt real easy into the chair. cuz honestly, when the day arrives, who the fuck wants to be thinking? what’s there left to think about? you’re what, worried about your 403(b)? your student loan debt? kant’s “categorical imperative”? well you better stop, cuz that metaphysical gordian knot you’ve wrapped yourself into isn’t coming undone. not in time, at least. not within the next three to six months, for sure. what you got in your head, at your fingers, is all you’re ever gonna have on you. but you’ll need all the tools you got to dig the ditch they bury you in. so you better get to it. ain’t no time like the present…

(goddamit…)

see, i wanna skip all over this shit. let’s skip over the poor me’s and the i’m too young to die’s. cuz that’s also fucking cliche. someone else’s deep well of shit i’m supposed to rain into. i don’t wanna do that. cuz i’m not too young to die. and there’s nothing fairer than life calling in a debt, so here i am: taking quick stock, inventorying my resources, deciding what to throw out first.

but i can’t do anything until this motherfucker across the way finishes telling me i have stage four metastatic prostrate cancer. it’s in my bones, he says. i'm thirty-six, i say. you have four to nine months, he says.

(damn.)

i don’t normally talk like this. curse words like “fuck” and “shit” are also cliches. they’re filler words, deployed when you’ve nothing better to say but still gotta make a little noise. i used to speak real well. i bought all the $10 words they had in the store and spread them all over town like willie wilson, dropping them in bodegas and gin joints all over chicago. i made it rain dolla dolla billz all over the great plains. but things feel different now, so i’ll drop one pretense to take up another. how else do i see the world anew without new words to see it with?

i was always told to write like i talk, but that was bad advice. i talked like a fucking prick. i read once that they taught telephone operators to speak in a standard (i.e. "white") american accent so any(white)body in the country could understand them, no matter “who” they were or “where” they were calling from. i taught myself that accent. why? i’ve no idea. all the money’s in having your own voice, in making those assholes understand YOU. i never developed a voice of my own. i aped other people’s. now here i am: fumbling desperately to find what i was supposed to have all along.

i am in this office by myself. just me and the doctor. i don’t know why i did that, why i didn’t have someone drive me. it’s not like i didn’t see it coming. shit’s been breaking down for months. i’m like a driver on the highway, and all this time i’ve been running out of gas but didn’t realize it. i just thought everyone was going way faster than me, that i was just getting fat and lazy and old and losing all earthly ambitions. i’d no idea until suddenly i stalled one day alongside the dan ryan. only i hadn't run out of gas like normal. rather my whole engine was shot. kaput. and as i call someone to haul it in for scrap metal, i realized: it’ll never get up to speed again.

so fuck this. i swear now. piece of shit was a rental anyway. let’s trash it before we turn it in. someone grab some jumper cables. let’s juice this baby one more time across the finish line.

i of course think back to all the dead lifts and squat racks and preacher curls and chin ups and pull ups and morning glories. i always thought i loved that stuff. gains and guns in a swole nation. but turns out i didn’t love it. and why would i? why would anybody love being in constant pain their entire life, always nursing some overextended ego? shit’s pathological. irrational. but we do it. we do it, i was told, to stave off moments like this.

but ain’t that god’s sweet little joke? cuz truth be told, i didn’t do it to stave this off. i did it to look good banging dudes. at thirty-six, i’ve the decision-making capacity of a fucking nine-year-old. it did me no good at all. foiled by an organ the size of a peanut (i mean, a large peanut...a jumbo peanut even)

i’m only giving myself 1500 words to write this. what it is, i don’t know exactly, but there’s no point in thinking myself some scheherazade, going on and on, thinking as long as i keep talking that it won’t happen. whatever is there to get down, i better get it down now. but you better believe me, i’m gonna cram it packed. this shit’s gonna be dense as a mother fucking black hole.

but first things first:

i’d like to give a shout out to my bottom bitch, my boundless bae, my sazzy little man: i wanna go to all the places YOU wanted to go to. fuck me. i don't need to see china or italy. i need to see your face in the appalachian hills. let’s go walk the trail until my legs give out and you’re forced to carry me to a remote hospital. that’s how i wanna go out. thrown over your sweaty back as you carry me over sugarloaf mountain. your face will be the last thing I see, and that terrifies me, cuz before that can happen, i’ve gotta see every other face first, and that roladex is sadly short.

to the stranger-reader out there: i don’t know how to make you like me. like, what, you wanna hear about my volunteer hours? or how much i loved my grandma? or how i shat my pants at school when i was nine? but maybe that’s not what you mean by “empathizing with the main character.”

really i just want you to care what happens to me, despite knowing you’ve no real reason to. we’ve never met. you don’t know me. i don’t impress people as being especially likable. you shouldn’t talk to me for over twelve minutes in a single sitting, and even then, only in a public space, like a mall or a supermarket. that said, and full disclosure: i’m not going to give you a reason. none you’d believe, at least. i just run through my bag of empathy tricks: showing vulnerability. that’s one. showing empathy for others. that’s another. asking people questions about themselves. that’s a big one. that one works every time, cuz people are fucking selfish and all they wanna do is talk about themselves. so that said…

how are you today? 

what are your hopes and dreams?

what is your favorite memory?

it’s okay. you don’t have to tell me. i’m not really listening anyway. you, if you’ve made it this far, can’t get enough of me, and that’s kind of you, cuz i’ve no idea what the hell i’m doing. i’m tap dancing, lap dancing, i’m doing a shimmy on the northbound 6 train. i’m trying to figure it out, get it down, just get it down. cuz i’ve only 1500 words. <--- i wrote that last sentence two weeks ago. <---and that one i wrote three days ago. i don’t shit regularly, but when i do, i shit it all at once.

today a woman waiting for the 155 asked if i had a dollar. i told her no, but she said she liked the buttons on my bag and that if she weren’t an honest woman, she’d take them. i don’t know why she said that, or why she thought i’d really care if someone took a button for elizabeth warren or revolution brewery, which between them both probably cost $0.03 to manufacture, including the labor. yet it occurred to me that value was relative, and she thought they’d be items of incomparable value to me. because compared to whatever she had, they would be. that’s some fucking privilege, friend: not giving two fucks about my own buttons.

but time’s running out, and i’m one good week out from the morphine drip, and once i’m hooked up to that, there’s no coming back. so whatever i got’s gotta be right here.

so here goes.

here is the most truthful sentence i’ve ever written.

the one they gotta write on my fucking tombstone the day i croak. ready?

here’s goes:

it’s coming.

i swear!

just wait…

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FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

(adjusts tie. coughs into palm of hand)

i wrote this bit six years ago today:

it’s okay: you can laugh. this shit’s fucking hysterical, but what you can’t see from this limited passage is that the person who wrote it was deeply committed to finding their own pot of gold at the end of his rainbow. very dedicated to being the best at his craft, to the work of doing it right. i wonder how that kid who wrote it would’ve taken to knowing that he’d only six more years left. whether motivation might have been enough. whether he would’ve kept speaking. did he even have a choice?

we are where we are when we’re there.

i know of no meaner statement than that.

a sketch of you, my buddy: i love the tiny blackheads on your nose, a wee garden of potted plants. you’ll hate me for noticing, and all the more for writing it down for everyone else to read. but your vanity’s a privilege i can’t share in now, so all i can do is say i love you and the way your face has fallen millimeter by millimeter each of these past seven years. how my fingers scramble to find purchase in anything and everything around me: your long hair snatching the dreams from out my head, your hazel eyes with the flecks of dust, the color of the appalachian trail kicked up at dawn. i can see the dust shimmering, if only we had somehow made it. my imagination is dull and a poor substitute for the fact of living. but i marshal what resources i have and carry on. my dreams are heavy these past few nights. they show me what i cannot see and carve an everlasting image to balance the everlasting dark.

today is the day. at midnight tomorrow, i go on the drip. from there, it’s the great big blue. so sayonara, auf wiedersehen, adieu.

i wish i could say i’d said it. i wish i could say i was leaving it safe behind. i’ve tried to reflect back at you an image of myself, or was it perhaps an image of you? maybe the answer was somewhere in between.

in the end, i reflect what’s next. more real than anything i ever was, more permanent than anything i leave behind.

i hone into white noise, the theta waves of a cool blue sea.

in the end i didn’t need 1500 words.

i didn’t need 15.

i didn’t need 1.