Whenever I can’t sleep, I like to lie in the darkness and pretend I’ve been assassinated. I’ve found this is the best way to get comfortable. I imagine I’m in the coffin at my funeral, and people from my past are walking by my corpse and making comments about my demise. It’s quite reassuring: At least at my imaginary funerals, it’s amazing how many of my female friends were secretly in love with me.
Some people think this habit makes me a freak, but I disagree. I’m always shocked when friends tell me they don’t like to think about death; I think about dying constantly, and I think everybody else should, too.
I recall once sitting around a bonfire and asking all the folks staring into the flames what they fantasize about more: dying or having sex. I thought I knew what was going to happen: I thought everybody would immediately answer “sex,” but—as we talked about the question in detail and slowly lowered our shields of enforced normalcy—the honest people would admit that they actually thought about dying a lot more than they thought about fucking. Much to my surprise, everyone insisted that they fantasize about sex constantly and never dream about being killed, which seems insane to me. Relatively speaking, having sex is so easy. People do it all the time. It’s so pedestrian; fantasies about making love are rarely necessary and usually contrived. However, dying is always original. It’s always a onetime limited engagement, and (depending on your theology) it’s either the defining moment of existence or the final corporeal sensation in the universe’s most remarkable coincidence. How can anyone not be consumed by that? I’m constantly thinking about how bullets would burn into my lungs, or if my eyes would remain open if my skull shattered a windshield, or if cancer cells itch, or how it will sound if and when I drown. I cannot shake the notion of my head being swatted off by a grizzly bear, or of my rib cage being pulverized by a madman with a ballpeen hammer, or of being buried alive. There has never been a day in my life when I didn’t day-dream about having both my collarbones crushed into powder. And these are not things I necessarily want to happen; these are just things that warrant consideration (certainly more consideration than how I’d most prefer to orgasm).
In all likelihood, you don’t think about dying enough.