Death, and stuff

I slept until almost eleven today. I was hoping for a low key weekend, and so far so good. L came over for coffee and we had a great two hour long chat. It's weird how people with whom you connect so well can arbitrarily come into your life. We're both not big on the hugging thing, and we both know that we ought to be a little more touchy-feely and so we kind of had to laugh when we hugged each other before she left. She's a truly smart and intuitive person and I look forward to many more coffees and conversations in the years to come as we see where our lives lead us.
I then finished "Hey Nostradamus!" by Douglas Coupland. I read it over two days (it was only about 250 pages, granted) and it was utterly excellent. It was just so goddamn good and I cried at the end and I highly recommend it. It's about making sense of our lives, and about God and fervent belief in things, about family, love, loss, trying to be a good person, ethical choices, being alone, reaching out to people... so, uh, a light read. It mostly takes place in North Vancouver, ironically. I'm glad I didn't get around to reading it until I moved here; it seems fitting.
So about death. Yeah. When I was a little girl (compared to the gargantuan monster than I am now) I used to be inordinately afraid of war. I would guess this fear would have been present when I was six or seven? I mean, I would lie awake in my bed and I would just be overcome with the fear that there would be a war and this war would come to our home and planes would be flying overhead, dropping bombs and soldiers would be marching up and down the streets, pulling people out of their homes and shooting them in the streets. Sweet Jesus only knows where I got this notion: my parents were pretty easy going hippy types back then and I don't have a recollection of what I might have seen or read that would have given me this unfounded fear. Anyways, at the time I was quite convinced it was going to happen and I could all but hear the drone of the aircraft overhead, and feel the shaking of the ground as something exploded nearby and hear the muffled pounding on our neighbour's doors and their pitiful pleading as they were dragged into the street in their nightclothes. I even thought about where I would hide. In my parents' closet, on my mom's side, behind the deflated and mismatched suitcases there is a board which can be moved aside, which leads to a small crawlspace in their closet. If you continue towards where the outside wall would be in the closet you can peer down the length of the front of the house. This is where I would hide with my family (once I rousted them from their sleep, of course) when the bad guys came. It was all very Ann Frank.
I still have nightmares of things chasing me in my parents house and I am trying desperately to get into their closet and crawl into that space with enough time to spare that I can artfully re-arrange the suitcases and the board so that they can't find me. Also, there is a window in my parents' closet and the plan would be to leave this window open, so the monsters/soldiers/bad guys would think that I had clambered out this window, skittered down the roof and jumped to the ground and was long gone: rounding up the good guys, no doubt.
That was my fear of death when I was little. Then I got older. I would say that war is a definite reality now. God knows the US will piss somebody off and they'll bomb them and we'll be inextricably wrapped up in the mess. I don't care. I sometimes don't care about humans or the fate of the human race. That's why I'm not having kids. Fuck it. Let's all blow each other off the fucking face of the earth. I mean, that's not really how I feel, I really am significantly more positive than that. Some things that happen to me in my day to day life almost reduce me to my knees when I think about the goodness and the pureness that abounds around us all. Almost daily I am confronted by the astounding beauty of our surroundings as I take the seabus to and from work. For some reason I remember the femininity of this woman who had to be at least eighty, that I saw walking down some sidewalk in Kerrisdale with these youngish hair clips in her hair. She still had long hair and it was something about the juxtaposition of her brittle, grey hair with these youthful clips and the attention to her appearance and the overall sweetness of the whole image that has remained with me for months. I had a post a while ago called "Aunty Margaret" which was essentially about the Christmas card that I had received from her and how it made my day. I was talking to my mom the other day and she said that my brother, Jay, had been over for dinner and had pilfered one of her Christmas cards from her and wanted to know Margaret's address. She had asked him why and he said that he had been having the shittiest week, he would come home to an empty house,after a rough day at work and a long commute, he was fighting with ICBC, nothing was going his way and he opened his mail and there was a Christmas card from our aunt. He said it was the first thing that he had received in the mail since he had moved to Abbotsford that wasn't a bill or junk mail. So I think we're all out there, waiting to be touched and communicated with. Our potential for goodness and love is immense.
Anyways. My more recent fear of death has come as the realization that I have a lot I want to do. That I'm really enjoying myself right now, that I'm opening myself up to new opportunities, allowing myself to be happy and at peace and that I'm finally coming into my own. I thought, as I narrowly missed being hit by a car running a red light the other day, that I really like living right now and I would really like for it to continue for a very long time.
Right. So you should really check out that book.
And try not to run red lights.