Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

You do not get to my age in life without burying a few people, and without starting the climb up the mortality bell curve where increasing numbers of those connected to you start getting sick and dying.

I dunno about words like getting easier, but you do learn how to deal with it, because each new case adds more data to your experiences.

One of the major differences between mechanics and doctors is mechanics can tell you to buy a new car, this one is fucked, so doctors play the “how long do I have left doc?” game, and for their sins the fact is they are just guessing, and depending on how lucky you are and how skilled they are and how much of your own life and medical history they are aware of, that guess might be more or less educated.

A mechanic guessing how many thousand miles was left in a car can only go for the average number, say 5,000 miles, as a best guess, he don’t know that my cousin Dave is a cunt who will blow it up in 500 if you’re lucky, and he don’t know that my old dad could have gotten 25,000 out of it easy, all of them without opening the hood or doing any repairs.

Doctors are the same, they’ll guess, and even if in hindsight it was a pretty good guess, that’s hindsight, at the point the guess is made it’s no better than guessing house prices next March 2019, there is no way to know.

Being given “weeks, rather than months or years” matters to you if you are 15 and haven’t lived much yet, not so much if you are 95 and have had a good life, but even then it is all a bit maybe so, maybe not, it’s a world away from being in a space capsule with 14 hours of breathable oxygen left, or on death row with a fixed appointment with the noose next saturday, because with those scenarios the probability of it being months or years until you die is precisely zero.

What I do know is even if it is in bed surrounded by relatives and friends, the dying bit is something you do on your own, alone, and for an awful lot of people, eg those that aren’t taken suddenly by a trauma or heart attack, there comes a point where they basically decide fuck it, not fighting any more, come and get me, and usually (witch doctor esque) the actual death comes within a few days of that point.

Being pedantic you can say that the thing that was killing them is not the reason they died on a specific day, the reason they died on a specific day was they gave up fighting the thing that was killing them, and only the young and inexperienced can say fuck that, I’d never give up.

More than once, because unlike birthdays, christmas and new year are pretty much universal milestones that anyone can relate to, I’ve been in a place where like that doctor or mechanic I can guess that Fred ain’t gonna be around to see next Christmas or New Year, or maybe the next candle on the cake, and sometimes I have been right, and sometimes I have been wrong, Fred lasted an extra year, maybe two.

If it’s someone you care about you hope that they will remain pretty comfortable and independent until one night they go to bed and next day they just don’t wake up, if it is someone you hate you hope that they will have several years or misery, pain and suffering, but the fact is like many other things in life, what they get is what they get.

A good enough mechanic given enough time and resources can keep any single vehicle on the road, indefinitely, not so with the medical profession, they may well detect things like cancer and so on, and offer treatments, but I have always been left with the vague quasi religious impression that your time is either up, or it ain’t, and either way no earthly matters are going to change that much.

Perhaps in some sci-fi med-tech future that may not be the case, everyone who isn’t killed suddenly in a car crash can expect to live to be 125 and also expect to be fully active and aware up until the end, but not now.

In my life I have seen amazing advances is medicine and technology, but I’m a lot more dubious about any of it cheating destiny.

I’ve seen people with “incurable” cancer cured, then a year later something else unrelated and unexpected comes along and takes them out, I’ve seen people who have “five years left” spend those five years under the doctors knife instead of doing what they enjoyed, and still die on schedule, and of course I have seen people avoid a lot of unpleasantness and discomfort, but still keep their appointment with dr death, and time and time and time again I have seen people survive something that “should have killed them, they were so bloody lucky, someone up there must be watching over them” and a year or two later they are dead of something else.

Of course none of it is just or fair, as far as I can tell, you can’t even get an adequate explanation for most of it, it just is… I’ll always remember the truck driver whose boy died at 16 of cancer, for me it was the first I knew anyone could get cancer that young, and I was older than that at the time, so it was a bit of a shock, how the fuck could the Norks nuke the yanks???

A biologist (evolutionary) might comment that mamma nature never intended for many humans to live much past 50, so all these “old age” diseases and death shit is just because they body ran well past the design warranty stage, and there might be *some* truth in that, Saint Boniface was born in 675 AD and was executed in 754 AD which meant he not only lived to 79 years of age and spent much of it traveling around northern europe, he was obviously hearty enough to be a big enough pain in the ass to someone to get himself executed at 79 years of ago, and this was over 1,250 years ago…

… and of course the bible talked of three score and ten, so 70 seems to be the norm for humanity.

Anything after 70 is a bonus, and yes, perhaps we can thank modern medicine and science and technology for that extra time, and perhaps we can say that that extra time is likely to be ended by something that was never intended to last that long failing, even if that thing is just an immune system that fails to suppress cancer…

As I type this, I am in the UK, and the age at which I can retire and get a state pension is 67, obviously this is subject to change in the interim, but if you put it another way I have less than a decade to go before I am too old to be employed by anyone except B&Q (a DIY store famous for employing the elderly) and in many ways that is a sobering thought.

It’s not on the same level as a doctor telling me I have ten years to live, maybe, but it is the same thing in the sense that it is a bet, made in general, without regard to any specific individual characteristics.

Who knows, it could be a good bet, what if I do have just ten years left?

Well one thing for sure is nobody is consulting ME, the bastards, I still feel 14 going on 20 inside, but on the other hand a whole bunch of shit no longer appeals to me, for example I can’t relate to guys who father children at 60/65/70 etc, I don’t get it, but then I don’t get people who resign themselves to a life working at B&Q until they push up some daisies either.

What I’d probably do is what I did, give up being the Cisco Kid and start my own small business, still working for an asshole, but one I have known all my life, and no I have no fucking idea how that will go any more than I know how long I will live, but what else can you do?

There isn’t really anything else I’d rather be doing, and that might well be sad, but it is also a fact, and sure, I am in the real world beset by problems all around me including but not confined to fucking state institutions who couldn’t find their own assholes in a dark room with both hands, ditto fucking so called “professionals” who I am duty and legally bound to employ and consult with from time to time, some health issues with those near and dear to me, the parlous state of western society and civilisation as a whole, and the price of fucking gasoline, etc etc.

My plan, such as there is one, and believe me, there isn’t one, except isofar as not having a plan is a plan, because that way you can adapt, is to do whatever seems right at the time, and whatever seems true to myself, because the one thing I have observed is that many, not most or all, but many, of those who live a good life and then just go away one night lived their lives that way too.

It’s pretty vague and fucked up and dependent on many things, but it has at least as much going for it as any doctor’s diagnosis about how long I have left.

death-clock.org reckons I’ll last another 20 years and die in late August 2038, 30 if I quit smoking, that and a buck will buy me a coffee.

I could get wiped out by a drunk today.

Those that I have buried, everyone talks about how they died or when they died, sure, eulogies talk about how they lived, but that is all bullshit, because in every instance where I have known the bastard personally, the eulogy bore no relation to how the person I knew actually lived and what they actually did and saw, that was a lot more like Rutger Hauer’s death speech in Blade Runner (yeah, the original, fuck the remake, ain’t seen it, don’t want to, that’s another age thing…)

Those that may not be here next Christmas or next New Year, fuck that too, I hope they live every day the same way they did last fucking year, or the year before that.

That’s why death and taxes is up there at the top, you can’t escape either one, but you can play fair and minimize your exposure to both, and have a happy heart because you know that, even if the fucking tax man doesn’t.

You do not have to go out and seek the tax man or the grim reaper and taunt them, they have a job, let them do it, by themselves, without my help, I have a job too, it’s called life and living, and that is enough for me to fill my days with.