alternative title, people I have known who for some reason all popped up in memory recently…
Stiff #1
This guy was ex-services, real kool-aid / indoctrinated type, had known him for a while, he got into me because he thought I was like him, he was wrong on this, I just never liked sitting in a room with my back to a door and all that, even from a small boy, also never liked being on a floor I couldn’t climb or jump down from, you get the drill, but in my case it was all natural genetic shit from a small boy on up, he thought it was because of military training, which is how he latched on to me.
Dude was always going on about “situational awareness” and stuff, figured I was not aware enough “any more” and had gotten “rusty”, whereas he always had a k-bar and an MRE and a ghillie suit hidden in his jockstrap… lol…
Guy got taken out with a hammer to the head from a new guy who turned up to the bar a couple of weeks previous and looked like trouble waiting for a place to happen, and he figured this yank had some cash stashed.. yolo dude…
Some situational awareness there eh…
Stiff #2
This guy was one of those totally annoying fucks, lol, he was damn good looking, tall, well built, smart enough, got a good job, made every chick for miles around wet and when he stood near them they couldn’t help it, they just fell on their backs with their legs apart… but, he was actually a nice guy too, *guys* liked to be his friend, not wingman, friend, he was actually a pretty good bloke, and being brutally honest most of the guys were jealous of him, you know, what has he got, like everything man..lol
Not that he was any stranger to banging good looking women, but one day he turned up with this chick… hey, I have always been a real cynic about beauty, but this chick just took your breath away, and then you walk up close and the personality and pheromones made that 50 yard away first impression look like a faded watercolour left out in the sun and rain… one of the most genuinely *beautiful* women I have ever seen in my life…
Course, it made sense that stiff #2 found her and got her, lucky bastard, but, you know, he was a nice guy, she deserved a nice guy like him, not one of us lads, who would just have fucked her rotten.
We’d had a few discussions about him being cool and smooth vs me being lucky and all round peg / square hole, then his folks get killed in an accident, he is suddenly all alone in the world, as in, nobody there to serve as point of reference for being cool and smooth, but hey, lucky bastard inherits all that money too, and it was a lot, business empire ongoing shit.
Within a year, responsibilities of the business and fair weather friends who loved his money, they guy has gone all grey and wire thin two dimensional and workaholic, the drop dead gorgeous chick had eventually turned into an obese jewish pwintheth freaky skank with lapdogs type wife who didn’t give him a child, and it was only a matter of time, dead of massive coronary failure due in part to the pretty much constant amphetamines and cognac to get through the day.
Stiff #3
This guy was a remittance man, back in the day, if you were an extreme asshole and your parents were loaded and had social status, they pay you to stay away, far far away, and as long as you stayed away, the cheques kept coming every month.
Shakespeare could have written a play about all the dysfunctionality in this lot, but hey, life was never boring…lol
He’d had a string of floosies, before he settled with one girl, and promptly started pumping out kids and keeping her tied to the sink and eating in a bid to make her unattractive to other guys… I ended up fucking her for a while anyway, which we had a standoff at high noon sort of row about, we ended up having a couple of beers, and he said to me I hate you and you’re a complete cunt, but, I’m still glad it was you and not any of those other bastards, cos you don’t give a fuck about her either, they’d have given her all that baby I wanna rescue you from this shit stuff…
At the time I wondered if I was the trigger, but looking back I was just a symptom, he was losing it anyway, and it turned out the folks back home were getting old and decrepit and losing social standing and no longer the wealthy socialites they once were, so the cheques were becoming less regular and all that shit.
So his behaviour and drinking and so on became even more off the wall, plus the eldest kids were hitting puberty themselves, and that makes a man look at what he is doing with his life.
Boats and alcohol don’t mix, and one day the piper came calling for his fee, nobody knows exactly how it happened, they found the boat, and 3 days later they found him, or what the fish hadn’t eaten after he gassed up and floated to the surface again.
So there we have it, three dead guys, and I’m still not sure what started that train of recollection, but…..
Stiff #1
His ending was ironic, given his situational awareness ninja shit, he certainly didn’t see it coming.
Stiff #2
His ending was ironic too, given how everything just fell into his lap, he certainly didn’t see it when he was young, but then when shit started to change, it’s almost like he got given another role and just shrugged and got on with it, knowing it was a slow and grinding death.
Stiff #3
His ending was ironic too, given how basically the world owed him a living, and paid it every month, just so he never had to change, but time and entropy kicked in anyway, and everything around him carried on changing, including his own tolerance for the lifestyle, and he also didn’t see it when he was young, but it soon dawned on the remittance man that winning that early prize meant losing at everything else, and for some time he’d been challenging death to come get him, time is past due.
The common thread in there is irony, and I think irony is an under-appreciated and unacknowledged fundamental building block of life, irony isn’t contradictory so much as it is complementary…
Irony is the mono-sodium glutamate of modern life, you can’t buy shit from the supermarket that does not have MSG in it, and you can’t have shit in modern life that doesn’t have irony in it.
I think, obviously I do not know, but with hindsight and analysis I think, that all three dead dude were aware of the irony in their lives, and FUCKING HATED IT.
For my part, I am I believe largely aware of the ironies in my life, and find it all moderately humorous, in a dark way.
Hudson: That’s it, man. Game over, man. Game over, what the fuck are we supposed to now, huh, what are we gonna do?
Burke: Maybe we can build a fire, sing a couple of songs, huh, how about we try that.
You know, there is a thing in the ‘sphere lately, if you ain’t trying to make a difference, put the brakes on, steer the ship, you ain’t shit.
Irony just grins, and says yeah man, and if you are, you are *still* part of the fucking problem, not the solution.
Compared to dude #1 and dude #2 and dude #3 before it all went wrong, my life at the present is pretty tame and lame, compared to them after it started to go wrong, my life at the present is pretty chilled, compared to them after boot hill, this flame is still burning.
Living isn’t everything, but dying before your time isn’t anything.