[Added June 6th: Okay let's just forget this entire article. You can read it if you want, but nobody knows what the fuck happened to Carradine and really we shouldn't give a shit. He lived a great life, gave the world some memorable moments on the little and big screen, was loved by family, friends, complete strangers, probably did his share of bad shit but who gives a crap? How he died will no doubt become as much a mystery to people as are parts of his life. I'm ashamed and embarrassed that I looked at his death and my first knee-jerk reaction was to think of myself - but I have said this before and will no doubt say it again - the mourning process is not for the dead. It's for the living. I find it a very irrational act, and until my father passed away about a decade ago now, making death entirely and painfully real to me, I used to find other people mourning to be sometimes laughable and other times disgusting. There are some people on this planet who are offended when you use profanity or appear in public naked. They react with disdain and dismay and try to look away or they make a scene about how horrible that is and that one should be more respectful of others and not be so impolite. That's how I used to feel in regards to people mourning. They're wearing their emotions out like they just regurgitated their intestines and put them on display. Really I used to find it that revolting and could only laugh at the absurdity. Then my father passed away, and I understood why we have to express those emotions and put them on display and share them with others who feel as bad as we do that we'll never know that person in our lives anymore. It's a wholly selfish act and I still find something offensive about it, but just as with all things that offend somebody, they're a part of human nature and we should not shirk from it. So here I leave myself and my pathetic selfish process of mourning for a complete stranger here for anyone who dares to see. Here I also hope to leave it behind and move on to something less maudlin and morbid. I only hope I can.]
[Added June 5th: What follows is a bunch of pretentious, self-centered shit. Tread lightly be you afeared of insensitivity in the face of tragedy. I'd remove it if it weren't for the fact that after a night of sleep, glancing over what I'd wrote, I find it endlessly funny to laugh at myself, at my own expense. Besides someone recently accused me of censoring my YouTube videos and I'm like "what? I don't edit my YouTube videos enough." Really. They suck. So anyway, don't take the following remotely seriously, cuz I don't. In fact, stop taking any of my shit seriously, cuz I don't. Even when I do, I don't really. I'm a toon. Really.
Also as a disclaimer, I wrote the following before the prevailing theory became that Carradine accidently killed himself masterbating while experiencing auto-erotic asphyxiation. Which I must admit pisses me off even more. Did he never hear of having a spotter? You don't do it by yourself inside a closet that's fucking stupid. You have someone there who can tell when you start turning blue. I mean really. Don't they teach these things in school? Oh that's right they don't. Why? Because puritannical fundamentalist conservatives would rather censor the proliferation of information so people kill themselves not knowing how to do it, as opposed to making sure everyone is properly educated on how to safely commit sinful acts that make the baby Jesus cry.]
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I should stop there. Three little dots. There really aren't words. This is stupid.
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I got a lot of shit to say but I - I should really not.
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I mean, I don't know the man.
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I should really stop right here.
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I call myself a survivor. I never actually tied the cord around my neck. I never actually stuck the barrel of the gun in my mouth. I never actually put the razor to my wrist, but I did learn that you cut long ways down the arm cuz otherwise the doctor is gonna laugh at you and I knew that when I was gonna do it, I wanted it to be clean. I wanted there to be no turning back. I wanted it to be painless and fast and final. I didn't wanna wake up in a hospital room twelve hours later only to find after having failed everything else in my life that I couldn't even fucking DIE right.
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I was seventeen.
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It was over a girl. Fucking stupid, right?
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No. What woulda been stupid was if I'd a done it.
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And believe me. That wasn't the last time I considered it. However, I came to a point where I realized that was cheating. It was a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and how dare I look at the entirety of the universe that gave me life and tell it I'd had enough. That I wasn't thankful. That I didn't have to clean the plate placed before me on the table of Life.
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So suicide is not an option for me any longer. I closed that door, padlocked it, put a chair up against the knob and surrounded it with barbed wire fences and attack dogs and then I built a brick wall around the building inside which that door stood. Then I demolished the city block where that building stood. Then I quarantined that city, seceeded that state from the union and nuked that country. Cuz when you kill yourself, you are a failure. Everything else up until your death is success, even what you perceive to be failure. Cuz you learn something from those failures. Usually you learn not to do it that way again. However, you learn nothing from killing yourself. You're just dead.
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Carradine? CAINE? BILL!?
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How? Surely, that man was smarter than me. Surely he understood better than me what the universe has to offer and how rare and precious this gift of life is and you should take what's given you and even if you're just existing even if you're just watching cars rust you're doing more than feeding worms.
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Maybe it was an accident.
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Maybe he was in a lot of pain.
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Maybe there's tens of millions of variables I have no capacity to fathom. Maybe his death was completely sound and logical and he gets a free pass, because of who he is.
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I really shoulda never started this.
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It wasn't like the man couldn't get work. I have heard horror stories about famous people in their prime who grew old, penniless, friendless, and forgotten in some old folks home. Carradine was not wasting away his senior citizenship pining for the fjords. The man was filming on location when it happened. Bangkok, Thailand! He was still courted by producers and casting directors and stars and he could still pick and choose his projects. Seventy-two years young, as they say. Maybe there are some lives that are better than the one he lived, but out of around seven billion people living today, I'd be hard pressed to count those living better off than him on my fingers and toes.
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But then it's all subjective. I mean I doubt Oprah Winfrey could just jet to Bangkok Thailand if she wants because as rich as she is, she's still got contractual obligations. She's kinda rooted to her spot, so long as she's producing her show and running her company. Carradine, however, was a free spirit. Nothing really tied him down if he didn't want it tying him down. If she thinks about it, I bet Oprah Winfrey would find herself easily admiring David Carradine's life. It's all subjective.
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I really should not hit the Publish Post button. I really should just shut the fuck up and let the man die in peace. Maybe he did have his own obligations tying him down. Shit I couldn't possibly know. Shit that would make me scream and curl up in a fetal position if it were in my life. Maybe his demons were ten thousand times worse than mine, which would be easy to do cuz my demons are all tiny.
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I mean I can't walk a mile in that man's shoes. I can't know what happened or how or why. I can't judge. I can't ...damn!
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If he DID.
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IF he did.
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If HE did...
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I was born into a world in which we were going to the Moon. Now, forty years later, I'm living in a world in which a man like that could come to the conclusion that suicide is a choice.
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David Carradine looked at the entirety of this universe and stared it straight in the face, after over seventy years of success and failure and love and loss and ups and downs and ins and outs and pains and gains and he looked at what the entirety of the universe had served him on his plate and he ate full well of that provided, but then with a few bites still left on his plate, he pushed the plate away from him, stood from the table, and told the universe he was full.
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Is this what I'm to take from this? That there's a point when you get to say you're done? Seventy-two years is a long time. Maybe he was right to call it quits? You don't have to clean your plate, is that the lesson he's leaving behind? Well hell, why don't we all just put on palm flower lifeclocks and die when we're thirty?
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Maybe David Carradine is right. Maybe we should all get to choose when and how we die.
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Why live to portray Bill? Wasn't Caine enough? Why not quit forty years ago if life has no value? Why didn't he stop before his hair went grey? Or before walking started getting a little tougher than it used to be? Why didn't he stop living the first time he realized he couldn't do stunt work the way he used to? Why not quit when he realized things didn't taste as good as they once did? Why not give up at the first sign of inconvenience?
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Maybe he had recieved news from a doctor or other source that he had cancer or AIDS or otherwise only had a few months to live and they weren't going to be pleasant months from his prediction, and he decided to just end it now while he still had the capability in himself physically to opt to do it himself. While he still had the faculties about him to take fate into his own hands.
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How did he know there wasn't another wonderful experience just around the corner? Why stop where he did? What difference does it make? How could a man with Carradine's life look at what was immediately before him and go, "It don't get better than this. I better stop now."
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I used to think Kevorkian had the right idea. If you are facing a life debilitating disease that doesn't kill you, but just makes you wish you were dead, you should have the right to decide how and when you die. I thought I still think that.
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This though. This came out of left field for me. I don't know if I believe that anymore. I don't know if I ever really believed it. Analytically it makes sense. Why suffer just to cling to a little more life? Just to maybe get to see another sunset? But in pain?
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I shouldn't have even started. I don't know what the fuck I'm sayin'. I don't know the guy. I got no place - FUCK! CARRADINE! FUCKING CARRADINE!?? HIM!?? OF ALL PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET? DAVID CARRADINE KILLS HIMSELF? FUCK!
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I don't even know him. It's not like he's the first celebrity to die. It's not like he's the first man to kill himself. It's not like I have any leg to stand on in judging a man loved all over the planet for doing what he loved to do. Heck, I'm even superimposing my opinions in that last sentence. Maybe he didn't love what he did. Maybe he was indifferent to where life put him. I have no way of knowing.
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But if Carradine can put two and two together and get five.
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I just can't wrap my mind around this.
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Fuck.
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May whatever you believed in bless you and keep you, man.
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