5 F's

Truth has always been important to me, and also honesty - truth's expression. I'd be lying if I said I've never told a lie, but I'd like to think I've told fewer than most. Honesty requires a coldness of heart at times, and the ability to tell someone something brutal. It also requires you to say things you know to  be disadvantageous to you. There is the necessity for courage and a readiness of consequence.

This morning I read a list of the top 5 things people say on their deathbed. The list was trite and it espoused a kind of Kerouac-style living. It felt strange to think of something as both trite and true, but the more I thought of it, the more I wondered: perhaps the more trite something is, the more true it is. What bothered me was that I couldn't really disagree with anything on the list. What bothered me more was that they were things I'm not doing:

- I wish I hadn't worked so hard

- I wish I spent more time with people that matter

- I wish I let myself be happier

- I wish I had expressed myself more

- I wish I had a life true to my dreams instead of what people expected of me

If there were boxes beside each of those, denoting a pass or fail, I'd be rolling in F's. What's the solution though? Burning Man is only a week long; what about the other 358 days of the year? I feel trapped, like a cartoon rabbit who's realized he isn't in a warm vegetable bath, but boiling alive in a cauldron for a gang of hungry cannibals.

Maybe what bothers me is the actual premise, the whole deathbed notion; the grim futility of things. That black-winged wave in the sky, a great unkindness of ravens rolling in like a black tide. I feel like Tippi Hedren sitting on a bench in front of a playground, doom and foreboding multiplying with each backward glance.

The doom is the knowledge that we cannot stave off death, we can only wait.

Then, before we know it, we're found ripped up and torn apart by time, cast aside like shredded tires on a highway's shoulder.