GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #845: IMMORTALITY

"Most Vanquished, Most Victorious"

 

I got to have a day off of work today thanks to the holiday. So I got to experience a weekend again. Time off without needing to go to the ER. Etc. It means I also got to watch Route 66 two days in a row.

I have no kids. Probably. Every once in a while someone asks me about how I'm going to achieve immortality. "I won't?" I usually say. Because there is no such thing. But people seem to be insistent that reproduction is a means of immortality. It doesn't make sense to me, but okay.

It wasn't until I watched this episode of Route 66 with Royal Dano on it that I finally felt vindicated. Finally! Someone else who thinks the same thing!

There's this guy whose son has died. But his son impregnated a Native American woman before he died. This guy hates his son's wife simply because of her race, which makes things a little weird when he gets super protective about the child she's going to birth. He couldn't possibly care less about her, but his grandchild? That kid is going to be raised as one of his family because family is more important than anything else. (Unless one marries into the family, I guess.)

Royal Dano plays a doctor who finally gets sick of the whole fucking thing. He shouts at the guy, "You think that's your immortality? Generations forget!"

Ain't that the fucking truth. I'm a good case in point because I don't know anything about my family before the lives of my grandparents. I've never met a single great-grandparent, although I came close to meeting Grandma's mom. She died a few months before I was born. My second cousin lucked out and met Grandma and Gramps when they were still alive. He will have memories of his great-grandparents. But in all honesty, can anyone say that they knew anyone beyond their great-grandparents? It would be a very fucked up situation if they did.

Regardless, by that logic, if I had kids, and they had kids, and their kids had kids, would those kids know a single fucking thing about me? I'll bet they would have my brown eyes. Because they were Mom's. And Gramps's before her. All my Illinois siblings have the same eyes. I'll bet they also have a birthmark on the bottom of one of their feet. We all have it. Sometimes it's on the left foot, sometimes the right, but we all have it. They might even have other traits of mine.

But is that immortality? Not just no but fuck no.

There is one exception: celebrities or people who are otherwise famous. I would hesitate to call Abraham Lincoln, for example, a celebrity. But how many people reading this can say that about themselves?

Exactly. I'll bet Brad Pitt's great-great-great grandkids will boast about being his descendants. But my great-great-great grandkids? Right.

It makes a little more sense that one would live as long as the final person who remembers one. I get that. But that's still not immortality. But if I have any advice to give you tonight, it's this: be the reason that someone grows old and rants and raves at the nursing home staff so long that they have to wonder what the fuck made them this way.

Just kidding. Don't do that.