Post-Modern Drunk: A Living Will To Power
I've been reading Charles P. Pierce's Idiot America, which, as you might be able to tell, is about how Americans are idiots, especially after eight years of Republican rule. Pierce is a profoundly funny writer of short pieces, blunted by writing a longer more coherent work, and so this book has been slightly uneven, ultimately. However, the most recent chapterhas inspired me to put my book down and come to this computer, It's about Terry Schiavo.

It seems so long ago, but the Terry Schiavo case was absolutely crazy. A braindead woman (and, after the fact, there's absolutely no way you can doubt that she was braindead; her brain had shriveled into a useless mass that was doing only minimal effort even operating her heart and lungs) whose husband was attempting to follow her wishes while being villified for "poisoning her" and trying to steal money from some lawsuit or something. It was a national disgrace, what happened, and one of the crazier things of the Bush administration, which is saying quite a bit, even these days. For the first four years of the Bush administration, Terry's feeding tube was removed and replaced, until finally she was allowed to die with substantially less dignity than otherwise she might have had.

As someone with some medical issues, I should really have some sort of Living Will, and it is only because of the fatigue and lassitude that Lupus imparts on its victims that has prevented me from putting something down into writing. That, and an inate laziness, coupled with a suspicion that no one is going to fight all that hard to keep me alive if I just so happen to lapse into a comma and need a tube full of nutrients, water, and whiskey to keep my heart going on.

But if something does happen to me, of course, let this be my final living will. I would like no heroic measures to be enacted to save my life. However, I would like dastardly measures to be enacted, for whatever purpose. Please, no police protection or security of an kind. If someone wants to sneak into my hospice bedroom with a pillow with my name on it, they should be willing to take that chance. It's not open season, but no more than the regular cordon of hospital staff, family members, and the few friends who I have not yet alienated in my declining years (I am likely to die in some pain, and pain makes me irritable, so my friendly security staff is likely to be depleted, or at the very least exhausted by this point).

Moreover, an effort should be made to alert a lifetime's worth of enemies as to my condition, if only to gloat. Please, let Victoria and Dillon (known around here as "Biff") know of my condition. Please let that bitch from my Junior Year Postmodernism class that hated me so much know what's up with me. Please, if you can, alert my Internet trolls, if you can pierce their ridiculous pseudonyms and find them in their parents' basement amongst the Mountain Dew Code Red bottles. There are more that I have forgotten, but I do not believe they have forgotten me. Let them know that now is their chance to say what needs to be said withour fear of mockery and disdain. That they can come and lord over me, and smother me with a pillow, or perhaps futz with my morphine drip in a way that leads me off into the undiscovered country. Now is their chance to win one, for once in their lives, or perhaps not lose so badly this time. If it makes them feel any better, they can know that if I could, I would, for hate's sake, spit my last breath at them. They might be satisfied with my death rattle.

That is all. No heroic measures, please. I've never been much for heroism, outside of my comic collection. And I'm not all that much on dignity, as any number of drunken videos of me on the internet will show. I'd just like to be comfortable, so if you can arrange a couple of shots of bourbon and maybe some sweet sweet morphine, maybe coupled with a visit from my cat, the people I love, and maybe a cigarette or two, maybe, just maybe, that won't be such a bad way to go, after all.

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