Going Up

Just had my strangest hour of tele watching ever.

 

I’m watching this really cool show on the Discovery Channel called MythBusters. The show is about these two dudes who, as the title suggests, bust, prove or deem improbable urban myths of a technical nature.

 

Tonight, for example, they tested the idea that if you jump at the very last second in a falling elevator, you can live.

 

But, like everyone, I’m channel hopping. Six Feet Under is on HBO. I used to follow that show when I was in more of a tele watching phase but it got boring so like all things boring I tuned it out. For a couple of years.

 

By chance I saw last week’s episode where the main character, Nate, dies of an arteriovenous brain hemorrhage. He died in his sleep while dreaming of running into the ocean. It kind of got to me. Nate was buried in this week’s episode amidst the unsettled lives he left behind.

 

Still, I’m channel hopping.

I go back to MythBusters, absolutely fascinated with the whole dropping elevator experiment. The myth was busted. If the elevator falls without the safety brakes or counterweight; you can jump all the hell you want. You’re gonna be a bloody meat pancake.

 

Flipping back and forth between shows I see scenes of dirt being tossed onto Nate’s six-foot under shrouded body, of an elevator screaming down a dusty shaft, of mourners weeping over a grave, of a crash test dummy exploding, and of Six Feet hitting the closing credits as the fade out stanza of my long ago adopted mantra, “All Apologies,” repeats over and over and over and over. I get this feeling of loathing and loving my brushes with past passive inclinations of self-destruction.

 

What is it in us that powers these thoughts, these compulsions to bring ourselves down? Is it pursuit of the death dream, like Nate diving forever into warm whitecaps? Is it to just test ourselves?

 

Could I get any more blog cliché right now?

 

At what point does pensive pessimism pivot to promise? When is the uber-second where destruction is displaced by hope?

 

Tell you one thing. Earlier in the evening I was online looking for a motorcycle while smoking a cigarette, and, sometime later, thinking of a future as I had never imagined it.