Premature annihilation

September 16^th – Don’t know who said it but I‘ll bet one of you lot do, that thing about;

If I open my copy of The Times in the morning and see that my name isn’t in the obituary column then it’s a good day.

I do know, however, that it was Mark Twain who, on hearing that his obituary had been printed in the New York Journal had wired the paper to say;

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Nice.

Now here’s a question. Ever wished anybody dead?

Anybody?

I’ve not, but I have to be honest (if this stuff I write is anything it’s honest) I can remember times when I’ve thought;

I won’t be sorry when she/he is gone.

Isn’t that a terrible thing, to not be bothered if someone’s life ends? It is, isn’t it? Certainly, on the handful of times when this diabolic thought has insinuated itself into my solutions to difficulties, I’ve suffered a twinge of…I don’t know…of…not guilt, not so tangible as that…a twinge of regret that I should forget my humanity so easily, let slip one of the core differences between homo sapiens and the rest on the animal kingdom; compassion. Just that, with folk who do unspeakable things to others, they awaken a sort of historic thought train that steams through the idyllic country stations of considered thought and rational understanding and pulls straight into the industrial siding of vengeance.

My guess is that the loss of any life is mourned by someone somewhere. I mean, even Adolph Hitler’s passing was mourned by those in command of his various enterprises; Pol Pot was revered by his followers and his death seen as terrible blow to the country. It would seem there will always be someone to weep for your demise no matter how big a blot on humanity’s landscape you were in your life.

There’s also a sort of sideways slant on this, for me anyhow. It has often occurred to me that those who might have a say in the way the world is run for the betterment of mankind die early and often violently, and those who would seek to destroy all except that which they would claim for their own live on to ripe old age and die peacefully in their beds. That’s when the, that doesn’t seem fair demon jumps on my left shoulder and I hear the echo of;

Why did it happen that way round? Why couldn’t it have been…?

But I rationalise that by further understanding the randomness of life and death, that there is no Great Plan and that, given a life uninterrupted by violence, our DNA imprint pre-determines our longevity and the cause of our demise: works for me anyhow… That’s the scary thing about DNA being held on records or held as part of a national data base. Used for the good of humanity it could be a touchstone moment in our quality of life but you know, you just know that some shitty, slithey, scab mongering insurance company will tap into it just make a buck.

What must have been surreal though, on this day in 1967, was for Englebert Humperdink (Arnold Dorsey) to hear announced on the radio, as he sat on his terrace eating his Ricicles, that he’d been killed in a car crash and it has to be admitted, when I had to suffer that poisonous ballad, Please Release Me played over and over when it made number one in 1967, there was an odd moment when I thought…good title, let’s give it a go…