Already Dead

Currently watching: The Twilight Zone on Chiller Network.

I am already dead.

Here's what led up to it: back on November 20, 1983 I watched a television movie aired on ABC called "The Day After," about the after effects of nuclear attack on the United States. It was followed by a discussion with Carl Sagan, who used the term Nuclear Winter for the first time I can remember.

The film is REALLY intense. (Check out this evaluation and review HERE)

Leading up to the broadcast of this show, my school had been inundated with materials about nuclear war - including a map posted on the wall showing quite clearly that the town where I grew up (Greenville, OH) was well within the blast range of the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which is assumed to be a preferred target. So, pretty much, right off the bat we we were informed we were as good as dead when the shyte went down.

Then, a couple of weeks after watching the movie, I was lying in bed reading a book, listening to a broadcast from WTUE 104.7FM in Dayton - when it all of the sudden cut off... As in absolute dead silence. The bomb(s) had fallen - and the blast was on it's way to wipe us off the planet.

I stayed there - waiting for the world to end... And I'm still there.

Did you ever read the story by Ambrose Bierce, or see the short film directed by Robert Enrico, "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge?" In the moments before the onset of death while he is being hanged, a Confederate sympathizer "lives" a dream where he escapes hanging and continues his life... until the rope snaps.

In my "life," the stereo's tape player clicked off - I had been listening to a tape recording I made of a radio broadcast. Sweating, pale and shaken, I continued on... "living" on borrowed time until the blast reaches me, still lying in that bed in the house in Greenville with that book.

It was "years" later when I came across in my research of the tenets of Bushido that a Samurai accepts that he is already dead, and therefore is free from fear to live his life. More on that another time --

If I believed that I wasn't still lying on that bed awaiting final destruction, then I would live my life that way, too - free from fear. It is how I continue to live this dream...

How are you living yours?