Stargazer

(Beach Baby, 2011)

I call to you, Stargazer. The sky opens, what was once day in blue and white is now black, the air is being sucked out and lost in the cosmos and the little dots of white that float aimlessly in the darkness are burning balls of nuclear fusion. I sit back in my lawn chair smoking a pipe I found in a box of my grandfather's things and just say to myself, yes yes yes... I put my Ray Bans on, I smile, and take puffs of mary until I am completely numb.

A comedian once said that out of any other death, no matter how unique and bizarre it was, dying of the apocalypse would outshine any death. You'd arrive in the afterlife, a celebrity, "Hey, that's John, he died from the Apocalypse", the man eaten by a shark would say.

I often wonder what I'd do if I were to face something so brilliant so fearful it made no sense and yet it made all the sense in the world. I wonder what the end of the world would look like, then I wonder how I would feel about all of it. Inside me I'd want to capture that moment, remember it forever, it was one of those photographic moments that speak for the crazy world we live in, it would have to be captured and shared as a mark of history. But there would be no history afterwards, everything will be gone. I really hope the animals and plants can go on, just take us, humans, in whatever blast of furious energy that sends us all to our deaths. But let this planet keep going, let us go the way of the Dinosaur, may our bones serve us as vague reminders of our existence, may it take generations after generations to put the pieces together. May there be movies about whatever intelligent beings that come after us interest us, such as Twenty-First Century Park, The Humans (a spin-off of the 90s Television show, The Dinosaurs), The Land Before Time-Time, and then go as far as to name basketball teams after us. The list goes on, we will be remembered but remembered for all the wrong reasons. All our mistakes will be buried. All of our greatest achievements gone. Beethoven, Space Exploration, The Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, The Internet, The Computer, Classical Rock, Dancing, Michael Jackson, all forgotten. Somewhere in the future they will discover an iron-clad instruction of how to do the Thriller dance, all is not lost.

The moment it actually does happen, that flash of light, like lightning, silence as the sky starts to burn, then moments later the sound of explosions, and everything going to shit. Everyone's head is looking up at the sky, some are crying, some are lost in thought, some running with their children (running where, we're all fucked). I'd use those last moments to think about the life I lived, what it all means now that it has a definitive ending, perhaps then it will all make sense, perhaps then we can all truly appreciate what limited time we had on this little big now fiery rock.

When I think about my childhood I think how amazing I was at Legos, not to brag but I was honestly the best out of anyone I knew. While I was watching my friends put their yellow bricks mindlessly in their already blue and red wall I made functional vehicles in uniformed color schemes, in perfect symmetry, and they wouldn't fall apart. I would take a kit box, build the model from the image, and then deconstruct it and improve upon a previous idea. I thrived for perfect in my construction, there was an idea in my head that must be achieved or else it was nothing, it fell short, it was nothing until it reached that high. My very nature was defined in Legos, I thrived to achieve what my mind saw. Over the next couple of decades I'd come to learn the meaning of this practice, why it was so important to convey something inside of me in an external medium, which has been many of things, and now that the world is coming to an end, at least for my species, I could contemplate if it ever reached what I had in mind. I wonder if anyone has ever successfully conveyed that, that sort of reversed transfusion. And then, did it ever really matter, once it is a medium it loses something, it is given form, it is given a body, it is its own, it is no longer yours, just like a child is not it's mothers, but it's own. It becomes an episode of How We Say Goodbye as we watched our creations become their own, you as the proud parent, the medium as the offspring going off into the world, it learns to crawl, then fall, then walk, and then run, it survives on its own, becomes greater, becomes worse, it learns heartbreak, it learns love, it goes on to impregnate others, and as a result parts of it get broken down and reassembled with parts of another, and form something new. The idea is born, and then it is born (again) in new form, and the jolly Elton John sings on something from the Lion King Soundtrack. It all goes on, the idea, influence, and the creation.

In the end, the real end, when all that matters matters not, we are given a new purpose and that purpose to give our bodies up, to fall, to be blown away, and to turn to dust, our bodies become something else, our spirits, I'm not entirely sure what happens to them, but the idea of us floats on, lingering underneath the ashes of what once was. When the Earth is bald, stripped of humanity, and the landscape returns to nature again, time has happened, something has happened, it made take years before this brief and crazy history of us is recovered, in bits and pieces, sometimes more wrong than true, we continue to live on, like the dinosaur that lives within us, we will live on in animals, as they learn to trust the world again, not fearing a hunter's bullet, a fisherman's hook, Rambo's knife.

Up in the stars they watch on, as one episode ends another begins, or they grow bored and surf the channels of the Universe for something more interesting. AND SO IT WAS, IT WAS, IT WAS, IT WAS, WAS, WAS, NO LONGER, BUT NEVER SAY NEVER, JUST STOPS, FOR HOW LONG, I'M NOT TOO SURE, BUT IT STOPS, AND IT BECOMES SOMETHING THAT WAS, IT WAS, IT WAS.