July 25, 2013
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JFK Tower- We’re going down!”
I believe there’s something about knowing you’re gonna die within days, minutes, or seconds that is a Particularly Shitty Life experience. I mean, like Rosenberg, sitting in the chair,like un-numbered handcuffed souls on the gallows, rope around their necks, or… like Caryl Goddamn Chessman, on the cover of f*cking Time magazine when I was only, like twelve, sitting in the octagonal sealed room at San Quentin waiting for the end. Jezuz, if that don’t scar a guy, what does? I often have horrible nightmares to this day of a guy on a slowly-sinking ship, waking from a peaceful night’s sleep during which he dreamed of ‘life as usual’. He awakens to re-realize that he is, in fact, gonna die, which makes the dream even more sad, among other adjectives.
“Airplane drivers“, as all my pro pilot friends love to call themselves, are less rattled by the End. They realize that every minute aloft is a little gift from Bernoulli & Boeing, perhaps in that order. Thus the last words of a 737 going down are remarkably ..calm?
OK, I’ve had nothing going on in my brain except Death and Doom ever since I read, like millions of others, that Xanga was in trouble. It all started from, I presume, a single e-mail from Server-Svc-NJ-Inc. which said, in brief, ‘Dear Xanga.com, we would love to continue our relationship with your concern, however the $60K arrears you have sadly accumulated, makes this problematic./ Sincerely
ASIDE: A DEEP AND HEARTFELT THANK-YOU TO ALL WHO COMMENTED ON MY PREVIOUS POST CONCERNING WORD-PRESS. I am just too busy dealing with my personal life/ bankruptcy, to reply to each and every lovely commenter individually, which is my style here.
Not to mention the incessant helicopter traffic overhead. Who really knows what kinds of cameras they have mounted thereupon.Bottom Line: I do hope and pray that there will be something recognizable surviving from XANGA after this weekend.
None of us deserve to watch yet another beloved entity die. I think of my final seconds aboard US Air Flight XXX, heading nose-down for the slum-houses of Bayonne, New Jersey, and screaming: “OMG, my Xanga Pulses: I forgot to Archive my Pulses.”
Comments (16)
Scary.
What color is your parachute?? Because I’ve got one and should Xanga go down I’ll jump. Not sure where I’ll land but I’ll not die if I have my druthers.
So far all of my last moments of life have turned out to be just good stories for later. Kinda takes all the fun out of dying, having to just sit around waiting years and years for it.
Dear JS:
A few days ago I saw the feature-length, animated film Despicable Me 2 at a cinema near you (It’s cool inside!). Beside being charming, adorable and hilarious, toward the end of the film a woman on an airplane headed from the US of A to Australia, realizing that she is leaving behind the man she loves, opens the door (amazingly, the rest of the passengers were not sucked out from the air pressure) and leaps without a parachute. Miraculously, her handbag turns into a hang glider and she arrives safely on land (or sea) to be reunited with the one she loves and joined to him in holy matrimony.
I have learned a few things from this film, namely that true love conquers all, even the laws of physics, and that one should always carry a purse that can transform into some sort of aerial conveyance at a moment’s notice. I suggest, my dear friend, that you glean whatever bits of wisdom are inherent in this story and find a way to make it work, whatever that may be.
Your friend,
Elgan
I’ll come back and read later. Have to meet Barbara for lunch. Just wanted to let you know I saw the TITLE of the previous entry and I have to come back and read that, too. I wanted to post a link to the Scrabble tournament results. Worked fine at Xanga, of course. But my attempt at wordpress failed. Livejournal worked better. With Xanga going down, I may try double posting the important stuff, at LJ and WP, but the more I think about all this, the more I think I may have to give up blogging altogether.
But I don’t want to lose touch with my friends from Xanga.
Life will get better, I’m sure. I just don’t know how. (Forgive me for venting here, I’m just killing time till it’s time to go meet Barbara for lunch. It’s at “Fillin’ and Chillin.’ They serve Lebanese food on Fridays.)
@twoberry - Ah the Lebanese: take credit for every dish we diverse denziens of the zionist entity ever perfected and made accessible and/or famous. At any rate, bon apetite.
I am on the fence with you about considering ceasing to consider blogging as a crucial part of acceptable life. We shall see, and fear not losing touch, brother. your info is secure in my banks.
@sleekpunk - ha, I wuz reminded of Sign 5 out of five for a heart attack: “A feeling of impending Doom…” Yes, those words exactly. I’m cool on 1 thru 4, but that last one is there ticking like a bomb every minute of my life.
On the other hand, it’d be great fun to do a health-pals program together with you. Somewhat remote control, but still potentially life-saving.
@elgan - A darling story from one whose opinion I learned to trust even without a ‘chute’. oh these many years. Thank the Gourd that our comment repartee is saved/archived, otherwise I’d simply ‘de-plane’ w/o handbag.
El, there is something so evocative of our ‘friend’ Alzheimer’ in all of this. Watching connections taken for granite {sp sez ‘fine’} turn to rubble, bless her memory.
I suffer a bit lately from…um… ‘anxiety-not otherwise specified’, they prolly call it. And just when the halcyon daze of the year’s poppy season have become empty bottles awaiting re-fillment.
Oy, what shall i do without you to talk with/JS
@murisopsis - Interesting that your mention of a ‘chute *preceeded* Elgan’s vignetter (below)
Yes, WP, among others, but I so fear a re-hash of the famous ‘lobster’ scene in Woody Allen’s ‘Annie hall’. It just won’t be the same with a diffrunt gurl..
Praying along with you for salvation. To a slightly older God, but hey, cover all the bases.
You have been the quintessential rock upon which Xanga’s been built, ‘watching’, looking at. observing’, dependably daily. Shirley this cain’t all be for naught…
@HappierHeathen - Apropo(?) One of my main desperate thoughts as I all but drowned in the Red Sea 30 years ago, aside from ‘Who’ll get my albums?’ was “gee, and I won’t even ever get a chance to gush to anyone about how damned dramatic and exciting this whole death episode was!’
Somehow I found a chance rock outcrop on the sea-floor, which enabled me to surface for a second or two a dozen times till my eyesight returned, and then I swam for shore, thinking ‘fuck ‘em, I paid for the albums, they be Mine!’
most of the rest of my 8/9 Lives so far lost happened so quickly that the follow-up was simply a matter on counting igno-seconds.
‘Pooh-Pooh!’ as we say here, followed generally by, “Heath, you should live to be 120.”
@jsolberg - Our conversations need not cease. We can connect via gmail, via google chat, even snail mail if you trust your postal system. If Xanga 2 doesn’t delete me, I’ll still be there as well, just not updating there. You can always find me at my various blogs, and I do get email alerts when someone comments. Don’t despair!
@jsolberg - It’s a curse, it truly is, being a natural born teller of stories. The one time you get the one that everyone wants to hear, the one about what comes after, you can’t tell it. And if you could, many would say that you didn’t get all the way there because there’s no coming back.
I wish I had all of my albums back. They got divvied up when I wasn’t even feeling poorly, let alone dead. I’m glad you got to keep yours!
It would be nice if Xanga survives in some form, but really, the handwriting has been on the wall for a long time. As my meditation teacher says, “Everything rises, everything falls”. I’m switching my worries to whether Google will decide that Blogger is something no longer worth supporting and decides to pull the plug, like it did to Google Reader. I made my Blogger blog a long time ago as a fallback position from Xanga – should I make a WordPress blog as a fall back position from Blogger?
@scifiknitter - my ‘fall-back’ position is the note-book/diary I scrupulously pen in indelible ink every half hour for the last…oh… thirty years. Google can, like Jimi hendrix said ‘fall mountains, jus don fall on me!”
It also makes testifying in court a breeze. G-d forbid, of course
@HappierHeathen - re: albums, all the best ones were ‘lent’ over the years out of love and excitement.
An excellent and poignant point about the Last Story being one’s Unfinished Symphony.
I do love my pre-need head-stone text: ‘WELL, THIS SUCKS!!’ Just not sure if the debtor’s prison burial plan covers both exclamation marks.
@jsolberg - If I were going to have a headstone I’d plagiarize Vonnegut: So it goes. I was thinking “You’re Next!” but that might be a little too harsh for who unable to accept mortality. Or maybe paraphrasing a white trash bumper sticker: If this headstone’s a-rockin’ fergawdsake get a shovel.
Ennyhoo, I hope you can get all of the punctuation you desire. It’d be a real shame to insult a man of such talent with language by leaving out the exclamation marks.