“No. Not like this. I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.” Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California get all the lawyers? New Jersey picked first.
When The Soon To Be Mrs. and I were just dating, I was cooking something or other. I think it was eggs. I like eggs sunny side up, and don’t particularly care if they’re cooked all the way.
The Soon To Be Mrs.: “Aren’t you worried about salmonella?”
John Wilder: (Laughs in full Chad manifestation.)
The Soon To Be Mrs.: (Swoons.)
Seriously, she swooned. I’ve never seen it before in my life, but in that moment I think that was what sealed the deal, the moment in time that The Soon To Be Mrs. realized that this one is different. He’s not like the others. Here is a man who has zero fear of The Current Thing, and knows that salmonella won’t be the thing that punches his ticket out of having a functioning circulatory system.
Weird. You can get salmonella from chickens, but not chickenella from salmon.
No. I’m not afraid of salmonella. I would spit in its tiny little eyes or flagellum or tentacles and say, “Not today, my bacterium friend! My Danish-Scots-Germanic blood is far too strong for the likes of you!” And then I would attack Poland. Oh, wait, that’s been done.
I know I’m not going to die like Hemingway, and I’m not going to die like the comedy greats Belushi, Twain, or Nietzsche did. Nope. I think I’m gonna go out like Elvis. On a toilet after having eaten a fried peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwich covered in cheddar cheese and mayo. Nope, I’m gonna die on a toilet.
I mean, after all, a king should spend his last moments on the throne, right?
A lot of people worry about dying. I suppose I did, in my 20s, when I was worried about carrying out my responsibilities as a dad. Those are serious responsibilities – because those kids are going to be the legacy that I leave on Earth. That and my writing, collection of PEZ® dispensers and velvet Elvis paintings.
I tell you, when the King died, that left me all shook up.
Again, a lot of people worry about dying. I’m not sure why. Of things that are more-or-less predetermined, that’s the big one. We’re all going to die. All of us.
And I’m not sure I care.
Oh, sure, I want to live. I have no particular desire to die. If given the preference, I suppose I’m in favor of my continued heartbeat. But I don’t fear death. I don’t go to sleep at night wondering if this pain or that pain or that thing might be the symptom I look up on WebMD® that seals the deal that Wilder is going up to irritate Jesus in Heaven with bad puns.
I don’t worry about some future point when I’m going to enjoy life. I’ve achieved nearly every goal I’ve ever set for my life. End. Full stop. It’s like when a baseball game goes into extra innings, “Hey, free baseball.” And me? Free life. I’ve done nearly everything I’ve ever wanted to do.
If you don’t like Hillary, you should move to Benghazi. At least you know that there, she’ll leave you alone.
What do you give a man who has everything? I mean, besides another bottle of wine. You give that man: Today.
I’ve got Today. The only moment I live in is right now. And right now isn’t all that bad. I’m sitting in the sitting room (question: is any room I sit in, by definition, a sitting room? Discuss.) with the cool night air blowing in the window, some songs I love playing on the laptop, a cold beer by the keyboard, and the knowledge that at this moment, everything is fine.
Literally, in my life, Every Single Thing Is Fine. I could go into details, but you already know how awesome I am. So, I live for today?
Hell no.
That’s YOLO. The idea that “You Only Live Once” is a free pass to act in any fashion has corroded society. It’s really at the root of many of the problems we have today. It is, in many ways, the absolute inverse of the philosophy I’m trying to describe. YOLO seeks to elevate hedonism and the passions of the moment as the highest good. YOLO is Tinder® times Planned Parenthood© times SnapFaceGramInstaChat® times Rwanda®.
I wonder if Hindus consider YOLO offensive? (not my meme, as found)
It’s the inversion of beauty: it consists of being positive about, well, any old thing that feels good. I could list these “pleasures”, but you know the list as well as I do. We see it every day, with vice being paraded as virtue, and the continual demand going out for people to celebrate it, because, “Can’t you see? This horrid abomination that no healthy society or people in the entire history of the world has tolerated, iS BeAuTIfUL!” No, I think living a life built on YOLO is one doomed to fail – inevitably it will fail based on two reasons: it is materialism or a faith based on the nihilism of the material world writ large, and it is based on needs, like youth, wealth, sensation, or, yes, even life.
So, not YOLO.
One thing I’ve tried to preach is outcome independence. Indeed, since the final outcome of life on Earth is fixed, all the intermediate steps lead there. Instead, I try to focus on virtue and faith. I write not because of YOLO, and not because it’s easy. Some nights it’s hard as hell to get the post to “close” and feel right. There are dozens of posts where, even after 1600 words, I still didn’t say exactly what I meant to say. That’s okay, it’s on me. I’m learning, and if I were perfect at this, I wouldn’t have more work to do.
For me, it’s the work. It’s getting better. It’s finding ways to add value to those people around me. There are those who pull their weight in the world, and those that don’t. I want to be one that pulls his weight, who has contributed as much as I can to helping my family and the wider world.
Why was Karl Marx buried at Highgate Cemetery? He was dead.
I don’t always do it. And I’m not always right, either. I’ve produced some stuff in my life that was really, really good, but not perfect. Thankfully, that’s not my mark, either, since just like immortality here on Earth, searching for perfection is a lonely and silly pastime. I want to make the world a better place with my family (first) and my work (now second) guided by God. And I want people to laugh hard while learning and thinking about the things I write.
The beauty of this is to win, all I have to do is the best that I can do every day. To win? All I have to do is be the best person I can be every day. See? Each night, I go to bed and sleep soundly if I know, in that day, that I gave it my all. Do I take time for me? Sure. But that’s not the goal – I serve a higher purpose.
So, what do I fear? Not death. It’s coming whether I like it or not, and, honestly, I’d rather not return my body in factory-fresh condition – I’d like all the parts to fail at once. On the toilet. I think Elvis would have wanted it that way.
Oh, wait . . . .
I wonder if Elvis ate eggs sunny-side-up? Hang on, I’m sure he did. Elvis ate everything.
I figure dying is the last thing I’ll ever do.
(ba-dum-tiss) Excellent!
Apparently Elvis liked his eggs scrambled.
https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/how-elvis-presley-did-breakfast
Here’s the recipe…
https://www.recipezazz.com/recipe/elvis-presleys-scrambled-eggs-33160
I’ve been to Graceland a couple o times. They don’t let you see the bathroom where he died. It was on the second floor with a small window just over the main entrance to the mansion, which they do point out from the driveway during the tour. He is buried on the site and his tombstone is supposedly misspelled.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1068646/elvis-alive-king-rock-roll-grave-revealed-wrong-aaron-aron-84-birthday-spt
They say his last meal was ice cream and chocolate chip cookies. That used to be my favorite nightly TV snack for years, too, fifty lost pounds ago after years of rowing. And after deciding to not YOLO chocolate ice cream every night.
I’m a lot healthier and I’m still alive. But I do miss the ice cream.
Eggs: that makes sense – they’re all shook up.
Used to be GM of the Exxon Jobber in N. Wilkesboro, NC, where Holly Farms Chikin was HQed (Tyson bought them years ago). Sorta funny joke follows.
HF tells their ad company that they need to up their sales to the Afros. Ad guy says, “Hey let’s get Sammy Davis Jr. & Ella Fitzgerald to do a series of singing commercials!”
HF Exec: “I don’t think Sam and Ella is a good idea for a chikin ad.” Groan…
Oh – James Bond disagrees. YOLT for him.
I have a special place in my heart for YOLT, that was the first Bond movie I was allowed by my parents to see in a theatre. Wow. Made a huge impression on me, I still remember and sometimes hum the soundtrack.
In the past year, in a futile attempt at raising my low-brow taste from junk food like Wilderian puns, I have been binge-reading some of the finest literary works in the English language. No, not Shakespeare. Ian Fleming. He can sure make your pulse race along with Bond’s beloved 1931 Bentley as he describes in loving technical detail during a chase! (See https://www.wired.com/2014/12/first-bond-car-actually-monster-bentley/ ) Highly ecommended. The follow-on 1980s Bond novels by Gardner are quite lukewarm in comparison.
Anyway, from Fleming’s first page of YOLT:
You only live twice:
Once when you are born,
And once when you look death in the face.
-Bashho
Japanese poet
1643-1694
Bashho!!! Chevy/Ty’s muse in “Caddyshack”.
If yyou want a quick, interesting overview on Shakespeare as a muse instead of Fleming or Bashho, culturaltutor has (yet another) excellent thread…
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1578360233315151875.html
Ohhh, that’s a bad joke. I love it.
With my DayJob as a hospital pharmtech, I unfortunately see just the opposite attitude in far too many patients and their families. In a post-Christian society, so many are terrified of their or a “loved one’s” death. I use quotes there because flowing from that fear people end up torturing themselves or their family member. Torturing.
If you’ve lived a decent life, go to your Big Exit Interview with grace.
To clayton. My wife of 58 years has been sick for the past few years with me taking care of her. She was a great girl graduating at the top of every nursing class she ever took and l end up being her nurse in the end. Neither of us worried about death and she was finally ready at the last to go to the hospital. While she was in there, l had a talk with God telling him how tired l was after losing 30 pounds and that she reslly belonged to Him anyway. I looked at the clock for some reason and then went to shave. She was gone and on heaven before l could finish shaving. They never had a blip on the heart monitor while trying to revive her. She had been to heaven and seen some parts such as her gold room with bible and now she’s home. John. Your article was just what l needed ar the time. I enjoy every article. Keep going.
Thank you so much. I will. FYI – read your comment out loud to The Mrs. Thank you again.
Exactly. And the line from Highlander makes sense, now:
He’s a Highlander, by God, and the last sound he hears should not be that of a wailing woman!
We don’t fear death; we fear dying. They say that life is about the journey, not the destination. By supreme contrast, death is the destination, and I, for one, would like the journey into death, once underway, to be as short and sweet as possible. I watched my father-in-law decay over two hellish years like a Halloween pumpkin slowly rotting on the front stoop. When he finally went, I am sure that no one was more relieved than he.
Beloved wife worked her entire career in geriatrics (I like to tell people that I met my wife in a nursing home) because she loved old people, and wanted to make their finals days on this wretched orb a little sunnier and bright. She witnessed more slow, agonizing deaths than she can possibly recall, yet never lost her cheerfulness or her eagerness to make the next one as painless as possible.
Like you, JW, she is stubbornly optimistic, seeing old age as no obstacle to enjoying life to the fullest. She is right now on an extended visit with an older sister who is lost in early dementia, in order to give her niece a respite from her mother’s chronic neediness. It certainly isn’t how I would choose to spend a month of what time remains to me. But saints walk among us before gaining their angel’s wings.
We have had the same, Chuck: My father recently passed after a 1.5 years battle with post-stroke dementia after caring for my mother with Alzheimer’s. He watched the love of his life slowly disintegrate over 5 years and his mind and body held together long enough to see her to a care facility, and then apparently just was done. My mother is still alive – her health is good, she is always happy to see us and kind, but we have no sign or idea that she recalls who we are.
Heartbreaking, no?
Indeed. One of the things that makes me happy about the world is that there are so many people who are so much better than me.
John, we live in an age where we are consumed by fears that have a low chance of manifesting and ignore those that have a high chance of manifesting. For example, the chances of dying in a tandem skydiving accident are 1 in 500,000 (I looked this up only after I jumped, of course). There are 1.6 million accidents a year involving cell phone usage while driving (and apparently this makes it 6X more likely to get in an accident than drunk driving), but almost anyone considers skydiving far more dangerous.
Why? Not sure. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that not being able to do things that convenience us in our minds represent an inconvenience, and thus are not “inherently” dangerous when we do them.
Like hiking, life is better if we make the trail a little better than when we found it.
And, that’s the key. The enemy isn’t the event, it’s fear.
The certain knowledge that death awaits us all frees us to do the right thing, each and every day.
The fear of death torments us into evil.
It is not the being dead that is the problem so much as the route to getting there.
And even the being dead is that there is so much to finish…
Exactly correct. In my observation, every bad thing I’ve done or seen done was motivated by fear.
The Comeback Special Elvis is the King and one of the cable channels used to have a faux commercial of the last moments on the porcelain throne commemorative limited edition plate for sale.
The final score was Elvis zero, deep fried peanut butter bananas AKA carbs one.
Fun trivia-you have to pay to visit the Karl Marx grave in the UK.
Clown horn, rainbow wig, size 20 shoes are not included.
From life in a prior interest or hobby that I haven’t messed with in some years, I got to know about professional diamond cutters; at least as stories from a friend. Some of the truly best diamond cutters in the world tend to leave a tiny imperfection in their work, saying only God is perfect. Perhaps it eases the stresses of cutting the world’s most valuable stones.
If you hassle yourself about not producing The Perfect Blog Post, think of that.
And, it gives me the chance to work at it again and again. Thank you.