On Greeting a Stranger on the Street...

Just putting it into perspective

My life is 1/4 over. Wow. I mean, I personally set my life expectancy at a nice 68. I'm certainly not expecting to live to 70. My family has a history of heart troubles, and I'm in terrible shape and I'll always expect to be, and I'm 16. So.. 16x4 = 64. Ouch. I mean, yeah, the first, what, half of my life so far was kind of spent in darkness (at least I can't remember it, and I don't feel that it's part of my life if I can't remember being that age), but.. yeah. Terrible though.

Did you know that there's a plant in the world that can live up to 10,000 years? I believe theres one living today thats over 2,000. Isn't that fucking insane? I mean.. Imagine if something like that could talk. It's seen 2,000 years come and go. You probably wont see more than 80. I don't know.. I just feel that that kind of boggles the mind.

I have one real, true fear in life. That's not knowing what happens after I die. I don't believe in any sort of afterlife, but death doesn't really scare me. It all seems so far away, and when it's much closer, I think that I'll feel that I've lived a good life and won't really miss living that much. I've already accepted the inevitability of it all (I remember the first night I realized it. I didn't sleep that night, for fear that I would die in my sleep, and I cried all night. I think that was 6th grade.)... But what really gets me, what really makes me worry, is that the day after I die, aliens are going to land. Or we crack the secret to life. Or we're able to reanimate human tissue the day after I'm cremated (which is really the only way to go). And that I'll never see what the world is like 50 years later. I won't know how far humans advance, and I won't know how it all ends. I mean, think back 200 years. Try to imagine explaining to them what a computer is. Frankly, it would have sucked to die back then. You never get to even imagine what a car is, or television, satellites, even something as small as rock music. It genuinely scares me that I will never know what sort of things are in store for our race.

And I brought up something there that I'd like to expand upon, but first I want to say something I discovered this morning. For some reason, my hand was on my face, and I felt my cheekbone. Then I felt the other, then my jaw, then the teeth and eye sockets and the skull. Everything. I felt my arms and my ribs. It had never occured to me that there is actually a skelleton under this flesh. I mean, obviously I knew, but I had never thought about it. When you think of a dead person you think of a skelleton, not a living person. It's a symbol of death. I also noticed muscle. I lifted up my arm after I got out of the shower and noticed the skin and muscle slowly sliding over my ribs. It just seemed so unreal. It's not something I'd ever thought about. And onto my point. I want to be cremated.

I can't stand the thought of my corpse rotting in the ground in a box with a bunch of other dead bodies forever. I'd rather my body were taken to ash, thrown into the wind. I would become part of the earth. In some small, minute way, my remains could soak into soil and grow new life. Or into water, and slowly become part of setiment, and over millions of years form into rock. I don't know, it just seems so much more practical to me. Shoving somebody into a box and have worms eat away at their flesh not only seems disgusting, but immoral. That shouldn't be how a once living creature is treated in death.

And I'm going to be an organ doner. Why not? All of you out there who aren't, you should be ashamed. For whatever reason. There is absolutely no excuse. None. If you think of it as disgusting that your heart is in somebody else's body, bringing them life, well fuck off. Just because you don't like the thought of something like that after you're fucking dead doesn't mean that you can't help somebody else live, which you had the immense privilage of doing yourself. The same goes for donating blood. I mean, I'm no humanitarian. I'm not going to do shit for other people, but small things you can do to save lives is the least you could be doing. I have an immense fear of needles, yet I still gave blood last year during school, and will be doing it again next year. It's not even out of your way. You go to school. It's right there. Stay an extra hour and help somebody else prolong their life.

Anyway.. I'm feeling really weird right now. I know why, but I'm not going to write about it on here, and I'm sure as hell not going to talk about it to somebody online, but then again, I don't have meaningful discussions with people offline, which is something that I don't really like about my life. At least not very often, and when I do, not for very long. Not nearly long enough. Well.. I'm feeling extremely "fuck it all" right now, so I'm just going to get off the computer right now and prepare myself for tomorrow, which is going to suck just as much as today did, and yesterday, and.. well, no, the day before that didn't suck, but the day before that. And on and on.