cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fuck Death. Ok, I changed my mind. Fuck getting surgery on this arm. I just looked it up and saw pictures that I really did NOT want to see and now I'm recoiling in horror. No, no, no, no. Not cutting open my elbow like a piece of meat. Fuck, no. People getting cut open has always freaked me out. It's worse now since I started hunting and butchering my own meat. Because I've seen, handled and very personally dealt with all of the component parts of a deer's body. Which was not easy to do in the first place. Part of how I learned to deal with that process is by telling myself the whole time that 'this is food, this is where meat comes from.' Constantly reminding myself that this has been the ugly reality of how animal protein has been obtained since the first time a giant sea scorpion crunched through the shell of a trilobite back in the pre-Cambrian. Ok, eventually it worked. When I cut a deer open I now automatically go into 'this is where food comes from' mode. A psychological strategy for dealing with the situation. It's not nearly as hard for me as it used to be. However, the dark side of this is that a little piece of this kicks in when I see an image of a human being opened up. OH FUCK PLEASE NO. Instantly, I'm thinking about the concept of human beings as food, being horrified by the thought of cannibalism, thinking about the fact that I am flesh and component pieces just as much so as the deer is, which reminds me starkly of my own mortality. I contemplate horrible violent death, ponder the utterly uncertain question of what happens afterwards. Tremble with fear at the thought of TOTAL OBLIVION, the idea of just getting switched off and all of my memories, all of my personality traits, my entire consciousness disappearing irreparably into a vast void. An eternal not-there-ness of me. A total lack of 'I' and the question of whether even the idea of anything else happening in the world after I am gone really matters in the slightest. Do I matter? Does anything matter? What's the point of it all? So I'm suddenly and dramatically disinclined to pursue surgery after all. I don't want to see pictures of it, I don't want to hear about it and I DEFINITELY don't want to have to lie there, totally awake (they only use local anesthesia for the procedure) and aware of the fact that they are, well, I'm not even going to describe it. But I'd be thinking about butchering a deer the whole time and it would become utterly nightmarish. *Shiver* Fuck death. Seriously. Fuck dying. I'm seriously hoping that nanotechnology advances enough in the next 20 years that something akin to immortality might really be possible. Unlike everyone who ever lived before us in the history of the world, those of us who can expect to live another 20 years naturally may truly have a shot at living for hundreds or possibly thousands of years. The idea is these little microscopic nanomachines travel around in your blood stream to repair damaged cells and fight diseases and cancer. It is very plausible; the first nano engines have already been built. Microscopic devices that turn heat or light into energy to spin a little thing around in circles. When they turn these things into little repair trucks that scoot around in your body and fix things, you'll be able to live for a very, very long time. Whatever the expense, I want some of that shit. I could spend hundreds of years without ever having to leave Trish or Ida or Harry. And hell, in 100 years they'll probably have something even better. Growing entire replacement bodies, that sort of thing. This kind of thing gives me the hope that I need in order to not spend all day in bed, hiding under the covers and fearing death. 13:57 - 2008-04-07 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||