CHAPTER SIX
A faggot died in my arms, and no one cared.
I was a cop once. And a part of the perks of the job was the ability to work security details for special events. It usually paid twenty five dollars an hour, which for 1980 was a staggering sum of money. On one particular Halloween, I was working security on Castro Street at Marchello's Pizza. It was the usual long, ten hour grind of drunks, pickpockets and stoned out chicks making incoherent passes at anyone they could focus on. On that particular night, the crowd was estimated to be over a hundred thousand parity goers, all crammed into the four small blocks that made up the merchant area of San Francisco's gay district.
And if after eight hours of being crush and weight of a hundred thousand people wasn't enough to make a person hate crowds, then having to be hyper-vigilant of some stupid ass trying to take my loaded gun off me would.
I was nearly thirty years old at the time, and these long nights of chaos and crowds had already began to wear heavily on me. By midnight the street party was just getting started, and I was already wishing to be in my bed after a long, hot shower. Thankfully by three am the crowd had began to thin out, and the pizza parlor staff was beginning to let some of their team off work. The doors were officially closed at four, when I walked the owner to the corner bank to deposit the cash receipts into the night box.
At four thirty exactly I was paid the amazing sum of three hundred dollars in cash, and was standing in the middle of the completely trashed street, looking at the waste and debris that thousands of Halloween party goers had left on scattered across the landscape. My field training officer walked up to me, looking much like I felt. The conversation was the usual cop talk, and left nothing to the imagination.
But in the middle of our conversation about money and the evening's madness, there was a blood curling scream down the block from us. People scream for all reasons. They scream for joy, for shock and surprise, they scream to emphasize crazed talking points, and they scream for pain and fear.
Both of us instinctively stopped breathing and waited to hear if there was another scream.
There was, and this one was filled with more terror. My feet began running in the direction of the scream before I had even thought of responding. Both of us were almost to the corner of Castro and 18th street in less than five seconds. More screams, and now shouts and cries of the damned.
There in the middle of 18th Street, just a hundred feet down the block from the light, was a group of Hispanic men beating the shit out of a faggot. The gay man was alone, and most probably drunk and mostly fucked up from a night of revelry with his friends. But he was too far gone to remember that even here, in the heart of the world's large gay community, there was danger.
And this poor, dear, drunk gay man was the wilder beast, and this gang of eight local teens were the alligator.
He never stood a chance of making it to the other side of the river.
As soon as the men saw the other officer and I turn the corner, half of them ran off. But we were still out numbered two to one. My baton came out, and I immediately went to work on the closet perpetrator. In a matter of seconds the group finally all took off running.
And left behind in the street of party debris was two sweaty cops and a dying gay man. His limp body lying amongst the trash at my feet.
I knelt beside him, holding his head and wiping away the blood from a scalp wound. He tried to talk, but his injuries kept any words from reaching his blood soaked lips. With all his remaining strength, he reached out to me with a bloody hand, and I quickly took it in mine. It was cold to the touch and weak as an old lady's. We remained like that for what seamed like hours, but it was only a few moments. But then all life left him in one single and solitary breath.
One moment he was there, actively living, and the next he was not.
At this point in my life I can't say that death took him. Because death is a separate state than life.
He was actively living up until the very moment that life left his body.
Of the hundreds of people who I have stood beside as their life ended, how many were actively living, and how many of their lives were no longer viable? How many had given up proactively living long before life left their bodies? I would have to say most. Most people give up on life, long before life gives out on them.
If we look to nature we see that everything has a cycle. Trees start out as saplings, and grow and grow until they reach maturity. But then, either through external circumstance like a windstorm, or insect infestation, they begin the slow decline towards end of life. Their canopy no longer is full, their bark is brittle and falls off. And the end of life is not far behind.
All this begs the question.
Are you actively living?
Or are you actively dying?
CHAPTER SEVEN
The trick is not caring.
In the movie Lawrence of Arabia, the T.E Lawrence character plays a game with a burning match. He holds it tightly between his fingers, ultimately extinguishing it. When a colleague asks him what the trick is, he states simply “the trick is no caring”
And I bring this up as a reminder to you, that life has a great deal of pain associated with it. Pain, poverty, disease, war, crime, love, murder, famine, and on and on. Unfortunately many people use the naturally occurring pain that is associated with life as an excuse to stop living actively in their own lives. Their pain, and disappointments with how things are going in their lives become the perfect excuse for disassociating from the only thing that matters to them...their own life. Drinking, drugs, sexual compulsion, and dangerous activities are some the normal means people check out of their lives.
Don't feel like I am looking down at you and lecturing you. I used booze, and later crack cocaine to check out of my own life for almost ten years. I stopped trying to succeed at the countless jobs I held. I drank every day, and smoked crack cocaine as often as I could afford it. All relationships were temporary, and subject to the whims of my state of sobriety at the time. I lived a nomadic life for nearly ten years, but somehow survived my own stupidity.
And I would still be actively dying (or actually dead) , were it not for the brief ray of light and understanding I had one fine day, that life, while often painful is just too short to not be alert and wide awake for it.
Where did anyone tell you that life was to be fair? What fool said that your life would be filled with rainbows and unicorns? It's not! Humans are just animals all trying to survive to live another day. We may have very extensive systems in place to ease the struggle of finding a living. But under all the glass fronted skyscrapers and high tech gadgetry, we are just animals rooting around to find food and shelter before a larger predator or starvation claims us.
The comfort that civilization creates is like a salve with which we use to cover ourselves and insulate us emotionally from the natural world. And as a result, we try to protect ourselves from the natural pain that comes from the act of living.
The first step in trying to live actively is to embrace the pain you are going through.
Yes, embrace the pain. You have to believe me when it comes to this point. That pain in one form or another will be there for the duration of your life. You can't escape it, you can hide from it, but it will always be there. It is not going anywhere.
So firstly you must just learn to live with pain and disappointment.
And remember T.E. Lawrence? The trick is not caring you have pain. The trick is to live with pain, and disappointment, and yet continue to be present in your life. The trick is to accept the pain and still move forward with in your life. The trick is not caring.
“Yes, your life sucks! Keep moving, nothing to see here! Stay living, stay actively living!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dying, dying, and dead.
If you want to know what actively dying looks and feels like, then try this. Go to your front room and sit in your favorite chair. Turn on the television and without changing channels sit there and watch it for the next ten minutes. Time yourself. At the end of ten minutes turn off the TV, look around the room and think of all the tasks, the chores and activities that you have been putting off while watching TV over the years. Try to measure the time you've spent starring blankly at a TV or internet screen over the last five, ten and twenty years. If you have children, try to grasp the vast amounts of their young lives they have sat in front of a screen, not living.
Even my friends who don't own a TV, now sit for hours surfing YouTube on their laptops, watching watching watching.
That is what actively dying looks and feels like. Actively dying is being numb to the world, it is being so tuned out of one's life that all of their senses, your passions and desires are drugged out of existence.
What was once entertainment, has morphed into a living death that fills every hour of people's life. According to Comparitech Statistics, Americans watch 6.75 hours of TV a day. And that is after a day of working on computers, laptops and smartphones. Our modern world is filled with the ways and means to keep us from being awake and present in our lives.
The reason for the fall of the American Empire is that its entire population is actively dying. No one is present to solve problems. No one is in charge. No one can communicate and collaborate with other people other than through digital electronic signals. The Millennials and Gen Zer's will binge watch Netflix during their weekends, and never once have to deal with other humans. The youth of our nation has an epidemic of social anxiety because they have grown up interacting with text screens rather than other rude, pushy, bullying, and demanding children. Schools added to the epidemic by prohibiting normal human behavior in schools by demonizing toxic masculinity.
Generation Z has been raised to not know how to deal with the real world. That entire generation is
Actively Dying. And the fact that so many of them spend so very much of their life, discussing pronouns and changing words and meanings of words, shows just how Actively Dying the entire generation is. In the course of my helping kids and parents of gender confused kids, I speak to many young people under the age of twenty five. And there is not a single one of them that is active in their own lives. So very many of that generation are narcissistic and self centered that their entire focus in their lives are their “feelings”
And their utter focus on feelings has locked them into a little cage where they run on a wheel narcissism every hour of every day. There is absolutely no forward movement in their shallow lives. I honestly fear for the youth of this country. Some day, all the old white men that now keep the lights on and water flowing will retire and walk away from their jobs without training a Gen Z replacement. And when this happens, their generation will get the shock of their lives to find out that making TikTok videos for the previous five years, won't heat their apartments.
CHAPTER NINE
As Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “Come with me if you want to live”
Then I must ask myself, what is it that I have to offer, that Actively Living has to offer you. And the answer while not very flashy, and certainly doesn't seem like a very good selling point. But, if you follow my advice and Actively Live, then I am giving you, your life back. The Universe goes and goes and goes on, but a single human life span goes by in what seems like a fraction of a second. And while you can certainly flutter about like a May fly for the few seconds you are alive, do you really want to go to your fast approaching grave unaware of the time you were just alive?
I once met a man named Mr. Kussel. I was working in a Tampa Hospital's Emergency room, and one evening I went into the waiting room and called the next patient. “Mr. Kussel.” He stood up, and with a large friendly smile on his face, he walked solidly toward me. I smiled back at him and walked him back to a clean room. In the few moments we walked, he told me that he and his wife were in Florida to go fishing when he began to experience some chest pain. So his wife suggested he be looked at by a doctor. He seemed like a good, decent man who loved his wife, and trusted her instincts. I asked him to sit up on the hospital gurney, and the moment he did, his eyes widened, and he let out a short burst of air from his lungs and fell backwards onto the gurney. I called a code for Cardiac Arrest and the small room was filled with doctors and nurses. Within a minute of his last breath, he had the full weight of modern medicine at his bedside trying to revive him. After nearly thirty minutes of his being unresponsive, the doctors even tried to restart his heart. These intense measures went all the way to inserting a cardiac pacemaker into his heart as a last resort. Even this failed to bring Mr. Kussel back to life. He had died right in front of me, looking me in the eyes and speaking to me, and no power on Earth was able to bring him back to life. He would never again go fishing with his beloved wife.
After a miserable and grueling hour and a half, I was asked to go find his wife and bring her back to see the attending doctor and her husband. She was in the hospital cafeteria sitting alone drinking coffee and reading some magazine she had found. I told her the doctor wanted to speak with her and she should follow me. I walked silently in front of her, tears falling from my eyes, and quickly wiped them away right before I opened the door to the doctor's lounge. I smiled politely at her, and was thankful that it was not I who had to tell her.
Mr. Kussel was here one moment, and then gone the next. Life can end in a heart beat, prepared for or not, wanting it or not, ready for it...or not. A single heart beat is all that separates us from existence.
The real question you must ask yourself is are you prepared to deal with life on its terms? Are you prepared to deal with the pain, the chaos and confusion, the derision, the loneliness and heartbreak of what comes with Actively Living?
It's not easy to stay sober and present in one's life when there can be an abundance of difficulties facing you. I know this, if anyone does. All major world religions attempt to give guidance around this solitary issue. Buddhists have long asked how to carry the calm they find during meditation into the chaos of their daily lives. They have asked this question for over a thousand years.
CHAPTER TEN
A SIMPLE QUESTION
Before he fell into the deep coma from his morphine, I tried to take the burden of my emotions out of the gravity of the situation by asking more about him and his thoughts, his memories and past life. It was the Tuesday before he died and I had just returned to the apartment with his favorite hamburger. Turns out he was hungry in thought, but when the food was before him, his body would have none of it.
“What is your favorite memory,” I asked.
His face lit up and for a brief moment color returned to him. I fully expected him to talk about our mother, or even when he was young and spent time with our older sister. But much to my surprise he told me of the time he lived in Los Angeles and would go to the Santa Anita Race track. He talked on and on about how much he loved to gamble, and being there in person. It was his memory of being at his favorite horse track which momentarily seemed to rejuvenate his spirits and body.
The fact that at the very most end of his life, his fondest memory was not about getting married, or learning to have sex, or any other domestic activity. But it was about when he was actively living and fully engaged in his own life.
Like Mr. Kussel before him. The most transcendent value of all the rich and varied human experiences Jim went through in his seventy three years, was condensed into that one moment when he was betting on horses at Santa Anita.
CONCLUSION.
AN AMAZING RIDE
Most young people don't think about death. For those whose life is fully in front of them, rather than behind them, death is an abstract. For people in the sixties and seventies, death is an absolute reality which they are coming up fast upon.
I would hope that for the young people reading this, that it could encourage you to move off your self phones and away from the internet. Spending hours each day online and on your phones shields you from the harsh and searing pain of life. There is no re-spawning in your life, only in your online games. Life is an amazing experience for humans, and we were never meant to hide from it. We were always meant to be hungry and dissatisfied. We humans were always meant to be striving.
And our mass food production, our technologies and creature comforts are rightfully unnatural and foreign to us.
For everyone reading this, please use it as a guide as to how not to live. Be actively living, not actively dying. Get out of your room, off the internet and away from the television. Life is so very short in time, go out and drink it in, bathe in it, and indulge yourself in the brief and finite moment that is your life.
Life, regardless of who you are or what things you do in the brief hours of your life, is about experiencing life to its fullest. Life is all, and only about life. Life is the only reality, life is all there is, Whether you think of life and God as being the same thing or not, matters not. Just as the Christian concept of God ultimately represents life, if you expand that basic premise out and out into every corner of the natural world, ultimately all living things share one thing...life.
And as I have stated before, live your live. Be present in your life. Move forward in your life, and never just sit back and engage in activities that don't move you forward or isolate you.
So there it is. And now the hard part of all this, is for me to not just lecture you on how to live your life. But for me to put these principles into action in my own life.
I'll let you know how it works out. You let me know it works out for you...
Rene
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