Death......

Hello to you all! On this bright and beautiful day I thought that I’d gather you all round and have a little chin wag about death.

Before I start, please don’t panic and think you have suddenly stumbled in to some sort of Emo blog where I will wittering on about the latest angst filled band who sing songs that are, like, totally written about me (and I if I had to listen to that shit on a daily basis, well, it’s no wonder they all end up cutting themselves. I’d have topped myself long before the first chord began playing), or worry that I will spend this entire blog moaning about how no one gets me or understands me because I'm soooooo deep (but seriously, they don’t. And it really bums me out man).

Nope, not gonna do any of that. But I am going to talk about death because it is a bit of a taboo subject. No one likes to talk about their own mortality and yet it’s something that we just can’t really avoid. You’re going to die. That's right, you, reading this right now, you’re going to die. And that person over there, they are going to die as well. All of you, you’re going to die. Even me (and seriously, can you believe it? Me? What a pisser!).

Most of the time we go through life blissfully unaware of our own mortality until it suddenly hits us right in the centre of our mindscapes and blows out our gaskets. Normally this happens about three in the morning when you suddenly sit bolt upright in bed and shout “Holy fuck, I’m going to die one day!” and then hide under the bedcovers whimpering.

As the months get pulled from the pages of our life calendars and the years start rushing by faster than you can hold on to them, you start having a nasty thought running round your head: Need to do more stuff and make it count. So you end up bungee jumping from bridges, leaping out of planes strapped to a stranger called Steve with a fake look of fun smeared all over your screaming facehole, or just simply start getting parts of your body pierced that really shouldn’t be. You start to cram in all this living in to whatever time you think you have left because you feel you have too. Everything must be done right this minute, otherwise you will just end up hurtling towards your own demise and the only thing that you would have really acheived with your life was assembling an Ikea Runtra coffee table.

All that new found life living sloshing round in your life like piss in a bedpan seriously sounds like hard work to be honest. Rock climbing, scuba diving, watching the sunrise in Kenya, nipple piercings, I mean, what's wrong with having a nice cup of tea on your sofa? And if you really want to live on the edge, crack open the McVites chocolate digestive biscuits every now and then, you only live once, right?

How I Would Like To Go Out.

1) Heroic.
Picture the scene. A burning building with a huge crowd outside. A woman screaming that her kid is still inside. Suddenly I stumble out, kid in one arm, Mr Fluffy the kitten in the other. And as I pause heroically with the flaming building burning behind me in a cinematic way, and the kid saying “Oh my god, you rescued me, you are like, such a hero!”, I collapse on the floor dead.  

Cue all the men in the crowd to shake their heads wistfully and mutter “What a guy” whilst fighting back manly tears. Half the women in the crowd fall to their knees in agony and wonder why there wasn’t time to sex me up, and the other half get so turned on by the thought of sexing me up that they start to lesbian up on each other.

So in amidst this maelstrom of suppressed male emotion, free flowing female emotion, and quite frankly, pretty graphic lesbian porn, you would have my crumpled body laid out heroically on the ground with my hands on my hips and a small smile on my lips and Mr Fluffy meowing sorrowfully to the heavens.

Now that my friends is the way to go.   

2) Old Age And In My Sleep.
The way we all want to go. I would shuffle across my warm and cosy bedroom, surrounded by my memories and things, to climb in to my huge comfortable bed for my final sleep. Maybe I would even take a moment to ponder and think: I’ve had a good life. And then I would close my eyes for the final time and sleep forever.

That's my ideal way to shuffle off this mortal coil and what I am aiming to do. Though I would have to make sure I had someone to check in on me every morning otherwise I might not be found for six months and then I would just be a skeleton wearing a nightcap, and that would look ridiculous.

3) Death Bed Scene.

Tradition dictates that on your death bed you have to do something profound. Those that know me well and read this blog realise that I can’t really do profound. I can however do childish and immature, so if I ever end up in this situation, that's how I’m going to play it out.

So as all my loved ones gather round for my final words, I might just say something to mess with their heads: I just want to state for the record that you’re all bastards, or if I disliked the woman that my son married, I would point a shaky finger at her and say: I know about the poison and then snuff it as the rest of my family look at her with evil eyes.

What? They would all laugh about it in the end. Oh Dad, he was such a kidder……

Ways In Which I Wouldn’t Like To Go Out.

1) Hit By A Bus.
When you die you shit yourself. Doesn’t matter what way you leave this world, its a given fact that at some point you will soil your undercrackers. So in the morning when you are running for the number 62 bus and end up getting run over by it, that attractive redhead that you make sexy face at every morning as you sit opposite her, she will see your pathetic body lying on the ground, most probably with pants filled with poo.

That really how you want to be remembered?

2) To Be That Man Who Dies In The Incredibly Stupid Way.
You know the one? You read a report in the paper about someone dying and one half of your brain thinks: Oh no, that's terrible, while the other half goes: What a moron.

Normally it’s a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A local man was killed today when was caught between a collision between a lorry carrying oats and a milk tanker. He died under two tonnes of porridge.

Or you could be the idiot who breaks into the lion enclosure at London Zoo, walking over to the pride with arms open wide and saying “I want to hug the pussy cats.” 

No dignity in that. No dignity at all.

I myself had the 3am wakeup call many years ago. It suddenly hit me that I was going to die one day and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Freaked me out if I'm honest. So I made a vow to myself to grab life with both hands, shake it around a little, and then maybe even give it a little affectionate pinch on the cheek.

My philosophy now is to live life to the full, to maximise every opportunity, carpe diem. In fact I am so pumped up right now just writing about it that I want to storm something with my shirt off.

I am of course lying. 

Chocolate biscuit anyone?