Jam Fac Id (Just Do It)

Fri, Apr 19, 2002 01:26AM -0600

Stop and consider that Saturday morning I will be witnessing the autopsy of someone who may possibly still be alive right at this moment. Talk about deadlines. (Talk about terrible puns.)

I have been traipsing through Chuck Palahniuk's bibliography, having re-read Fight Club, then ripping through Survivor, and finally starting Choke, and I wonder if Mr. Palahniuk might have been a med student sometime ago, or if he just did very thorough research. I mean, beside the fact that Choke is about a 2nd year med student who drops out so he can pay for his mom's nursing home by pretending to choke to death at fancy restaurants, his other two books certainly have their own share of mentions of pharmacology and pathology. It gives me the heebie-jeebies to read through them, what with mentions of seminomas and thyroxine, brain parasites, anabolic steroids.

But mostly, what got me was this passage from Survivor, which echoes what a lot of my dearest friends have tried to get me to believe:

With my eyes closed, I ask if she knows how this will all turn out.

"Long-term or short-term?" she asks.

Both.

"Long-term," she says, "we're all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we're going to live happily ever after."

Really?

"Really," she says. "So don't sweat.... Can you just relax and let things happen?"

I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen?

"And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment.... You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything."

But you can be ready for disaster....

"If you worry about disaster all the time, that's what you're going to get...."

The whole world is a disaster waiting to happen....

"No matter what happens," [she] says, "no matter what you do... it's the right thing."

(A lot of it is elided just to get to the point.) I seriously choked up when I read that.

e-mail: aswang@earthlink.net

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