For a second, I was dead — or I might have been.
Darkness engulfed my surroundings, and I felt myself being pulled back gently. The warmth flowed out of my body. Then I saw and heard nothing. I was alone, relaxed and at peace.
Is this what happens when we die and are reabsorbed into the cosmos? I wondered. If so, it was pretty cool that I got to observe it.
Then I heard voices. They had to be part of a dream. I struggled to understand what they were saying. When I struggled even more, my eyes opened.
Standing around me were five nurses and my doctor, who looks like Guido Knopp
Standing around me were five nurses and my doctor, who looks like Guido Knopp. It took me a moment to recognize them.
One of the nurses had tried to take a blood sample and couldn’t find the vein. After a few attempts, she’d hit the nerve next to it, causing my blackout. I saw the stab wounds on my arm.
Other than being a little shaken, I was alive. However, the whole thing got me thinking about life and death.
Over the years, I’ve drawn inspiration from a darkly humorous cartoon called Life in Hell. Its author was Matt Groening, the guy who created The Simpsons and Futurama. The cartoon I think about almost every day asks, “What do you want on your tombstone?” Among its nine suggestions are…
• Amassed a most impressive CD collection
• Bought The Satanic Verses, A Brief History of Time, and The Andy Warhol Diaries, but never got around to reading ’em
• Lived slow, died young. Sure wish I’d lived fast.
Life in Hell starred a bunch of anthropomorphic rabbits and other creatures who never quite managed to be happy.
Akbar and Jeff look and act absolutely alike, but are constantly finding fault with each other. Child characters Will and Abe draw absurd conclusions about things happening around them, based on what little they understand. And Binky the rabbit sums up everything he might want to say to teenagers in two sentences: “Don’t get pregnant. Don’t get anyone else pregnant.”
Some of the cartoons had a running theme, allowing them to be published as books. Love Is Hell was one such volume. It offered such aphorisms as…
• Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig. Then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun.
• Love is a snowmobile ride across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
Work Is Hell presented all office work as senseless drudgery. One chapter gave advice on killing time at work — “With some pushpins and an eraser, you can make a little pig” — but warned that even boring work is better than no work: “Ask not for whom the overhead fluorescent lighting hums.”
Life in Hell ran mainly in college newspapers. The final strip was published in June 2012. Groening said that The Simpsons and Futurama were taking up too much of his time to have a third project going on as well.
I have to admit I hadn’t seen the strip in years, but the early strips in particular really got me thinking. Life, love and work can sometimes be hell, but they don’t have to be. They aren’t hell for most people in Western society — and if they are, we need to ask ourselves why that is and what changes we can make.
I’m happy to say I quite enjoy life. It’ll be over soon enough, as I was reminded recently. If mine happens to end at a moment’s notice, I can say I lived and didn’t regret it. Put that on my tombstone.
