Leonard Cohen Wrote the Poems I Had Dibs On.

The area between your breasts
and your hips is called a waist
because I'm not there to plant kisses
across its perfect landscape

Oh, what a waste

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Slick the road up with some diesel, let's go skid a car side-on into a power pole, or a tree, or into an oncoming vehicle. I want those split seconds of lost control more than anything in the world right now. Think of it as a little precursor to the real thing. Split seconds to mirror the years of this to come. Or, if I am too weak to winter it that long, then much less time. I will be lying at the bottom of the lake.

Who really gets to find out, even fleetingly, what the rest of their days are going to bring them? Certainly, I am no clairvoyant, but I believe that those precious moments of rubber losing traction with the tar-seal, the rib-shattering smash of metal on metal, will mirror almost perfectly what is to come for me. Even if the mirror is only figurative, it is a better bet than anything else. Do you get what I'm trying to say here, angels? Am I making any sense? You see, I am the car crash. I am everything that a brutal collision is supposed to be: in control one second, completely adrift the next; subject to the whims of whatever I happen to crash in to; lucky if I survive (and most certainly scarred) or tragic and martyred if I perish. Ho ho, have any of you the foresight that I possess? You probably wouldn't squander it if you had it, the way I will. The way I already am.

But that is by-the-by. It has no bearing on this. It matters not that I am wasting the almost carved-in-stone certainty of my future. It only matters that I am not too stupid to see it for what it is. I am not too ignorant to think of myself as headed for more. I am not too mawkish and emotionally-fragile to hope for anything more than what I will get. I am not giving up, or resigning myself to anything. I am accepting what must be. I am getting my head around what most unimaginative people these days would describe as my "destiny". Although I don't believe in such pap. I deal in the hard currency of intellect, and the virus that corrupts it: love. When you are devoid of one or both of these, you are bereft of any meaning. So as long as my mind holds these golden trinkets aloft like torch-lights to the heavens, I am safe, if not exactly stable.

So what does all this mean? What knowledge can be gleaned from this page? The first thing to note is that I have an aptitude for realism. I have a bent for seeing things as they are, of being realistic where most people would fool themselves. Some call it cynicism, or other such derogatory words. I can't understand this. What is bad about seeing the world - parts or the whole - for what it is? What is negative about seeing where your faults lie, and where your strengths set up their walls? Surely it is better to be aware of, and acknowledge your weakness than to blither about as though you are infallible. Surely, America has made this the moral of the story of the first decade of the 2000's. You would all be better off, summer surfers, to acknowledge this and draw some insight from it.

Secondly, you should understand that I am not happy about all of this. I am not about to spread out the welcome mat for this insidious disease. I am not going to pour the diesel on the road before I drive the car through it. Well, not intentionally anyway. Perhaps it will be me, but I won't know I'm doing it at the time. It is crucial to know that those lonely souls who fall asleep to images of their deaths and funerals, do not fall asleep with smiles on their faces. We do not greet death with creases at the corners of our lips and a sparkle in our eye. No, that is for the elderly and the stupid. We are not a breed of half-wits. We see death as it most certainly is: the end. Nothing afterwards; no gods and angels and beauty. Just a cessation of our existence. It is not a comfort. Our minds and hearts are not filled with joy. God, no. Anything but. It is fear, it is crippling sadness, it is absolute panic. But it is all we have left, because we cannot control our own minds any more than we can someone elses.

And it is a tragedy, darlings. It is absolutely loathsome that we are afflicted. That so many of us see no other way. A person's last moments before they are gone must be harrowing and lonely and absolutely terrifying. Bravery is not a word synonymous with suicide, but from where I stand, it takes a perverse courage to become a statistic on this sad list. Certainly a coward too, but brave nonetheless. So think on that. Roll it around in your heads for a small while and digest it fully. See it as it is, not as you want it to be, or how you thought it was. Because what you see in the end is only the aftermath of those last, out-of-control split seconds when the tyres hit the diesel. Not the years beforehand. Not the battle that can't be won. Not the pain and guilt and disgust. Not the real tragedy of the living dead. No, you never see that.

Why do people care about superstars more than the state of the world?