I am enjoying being alive at the moment and life feels full of possibilities, but life also throws in some reminders of its brutality and fragility. Two people close to me are having to face off against cancer and today I got the news that Jeff Rudom who played Big Leslie in Time Gentlemen, Please has died suddenly at the age of 51. Although he played only a small role (of a gigantic man) in that show, he was always an imposing presence on set, gentle and unassuming, but keen for us to write him some dialogue, when the original idea with that character was that he would never speak. In the end we bowed to his persistence and gave him lines (or words at least). The stupid scenarios around him and his diminutive partner Lesley in the show were amongst the dafter and funnier bits. It's sad to see him go, but if Terry gets to hear about it, he will be readying to make his move on Lesley. RIP big man.
For a man who thinks about almost nothing but death and my own death, I am surprisingly subconsciously convinced of my own immortality. It's hard not to live life in the day to day certainty that it will carry on tomorrow and that there's still time to achieve the things you want to achieve. But cancer and car crashes and meteor impacts and contagion are ever present dangers. And the world ends in 2012 anyway. Somehow I have blundered my way to being 44 years old. I don't know quite how the time passed so fast or how I have contrived to achieve so few personal landmarks. And though so far my own quest for immortality has been proceeding with no major setbacks, I can't take it for granted. Even I may pass. Though I find it hard to convince myself of that final nothingness. Because in my mind's eye when I picture it, I am still there observing the cold emptiness and darkness. But when it happens I won't be there to witness that.
It took me a long time in my life to appreciate that as awful and heart wrenching as the death of an individual is and as hard it is to cope with the the loss of someone you love, from their point of view they have lost everyone in the world at once. In that instant of yiur own denise you have to cope with the fact that from your perspective everyone has gone. Then you're gone and you don't have to cope with it any more. But that moment of grief and realisation must be intense, especially if it is only at that moment that you realise that. Do you mourn your own demise or the loss of everyone else? No wonder so many of us try to convince ourselves that somehow we are going to keep existing in some gas like form, even when our body has conked out. Your soul will somehow no longer need a body to live in or eyes to see or ears to hear- it'll be able to do all that on its own. Which rather begs the question as to why we have these useless, illness susceptible, unreliable, obsolescence built in bodies in the first place.
So this has hot a bit bleaker and darker than I meant it to and if you didn't enjoy it then comfort yourself with the idea of living on for eternity without your body (which is the part of me I like the most- infinity without eating or feeling or fucking or wanking or farting even seems a worse Hell than just conking out to me).
Really what we should take from mortality and illness and their unexpected and unwelcome visitations on us and ours is to live while we're here, not put off the stuff we should be doing, enjoying the people around us in case they die or we die so that to all intents and purposes they die. I think too little and think too much and both things have stultified me at times. There is time to live before we die. If you're reading this then you still have some way to go with life, unless your soul ended up having eyes all along. Some of us won't see 2012, but some of you might see the 22nd century. Give it my best if you get there.
Unless I keep up my impressive record of immortality in which case I can't wait for 11/11/2111. In fact I'm not gonna make a fuss tomorrow in order to force myself to stay alive for the next one. Put it in your diary. There's a party round mine that day. The drinks are on me.
