I usually try to keep the personal out of this blog. Yeah, I spout a lot of opinions, but I generally keep it to things outside myself. The inside of my head is a pretty boring place, for the most part, and most of it is none of your business, anyway. However, I’m gonna make an exception right now because there’s something bugging me and maybe I can write it out. Or, y’know, maybe not. It’s worth a shot, anyway. So here goes nothin’.
It’s death. It seems to be everywhere I turn, lately. Part of that is due to the nature of the work I do. Over the past seven years I have worked in various capacities, almost exclusively with people who are either at the end of their lives or very nearly so. It can be very rewarding work, and I like to think that I have made things easier for my clients. While one does try to maintain a professional distance, it’s very difficult - if not downright impossible - to keep from becoming somewhat attached to some of the folks I’ve worked with. So the cumulative effect of all that death gets overwhelming sometimes. I think it would be fair to say that I now know more dead people than I do living. If I were older, that might not seem so strange to me, but at 43 (soon to be 44) it does mess with my head a little.
Death is all over the news, of course. It’s always been that way, I guess, but it just seems more noticeable to me now. Wars, terrorist attacks, floods, earthquakes, murders over the most trivial things… and all the medical reasons, too. I think what set me off today was the news of John Peel’s death, combined with the knowledge that a friend was probably going to have to put her dog down today. The impersonal and the personal. While I’ve never actually heard one of Peel’s shows, anyone with any interest in new music over the last 30 or so years owes him a huge debt; on the other hand, my friend’s dog used to come and lay his head in my lap when I would come over to visit.
And there’s other bits. We lost my aunt to cancer earlier this year, which has been incredibly difficult for my mom. It’s a hard thing, to bury your younger sister. We’re fortunate in that we haven’t lost our entire family in, say, a car wreck, but still…
I picked up the new Mojo today, hoping for a little respite from the ongoing parade of death. Nope. Inside were big tributes to Johnny Cash and Johnny Ramone. Both worthy of tribute, of course. I just wasn’t in a receptive mood, you might say.
Warren Zevon has been on my mind lately, as well. I suppose it’s due to the release of the tribute album, although I think I was thinking about him before I’d heard of it. My mind is a jumble of obituaries and loud music these days. Usually the music drowns out the other. Not always, just usually.
So, what’s my point? I dunno. Death is a bummer, but then you probably already knew that. And I’m tired of living it what seems at time to be a culture of death, built on death and celebrating death. No matter how fucked up the rest of Don Henley’s catalog might be, he pretty much nailed where the news media were headed with the line “It’s interesting when people die”.
Oh, and one other thing: a vote for Bush is a vote for death. Death for American soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be stuck in the ongoing quagmire of Bush War II; death for those afflicted with diseases that might be cured if federal funding for stem cell research were available; the death of your civil rights; the deaths of countless animals and plants, because they happen to live where his business friends want to drill a well…
If you are on the side of death, then Bush is your man. Just stay the fuck away from me, OK? Because I hate death and all those who work for it. No more death, please. Not for a while.