Today is my twenty-eighth birthday, and while I’m intellectually aware that I’m not very old at all, I can’t help but wonder if time is catching up with me. I don’t tend to be the type of person who gets all morbid around birthdays, but given the world we live in and the things that have been happening lately, I have a bit of a heightened awareness of the fact that we might meet our maker any day of the week. The last thing that I want to do is die (which I suppose is convenient, since it is the last thing that I will do), but thinking ever so briefly about the inevitability of death sometimes helps me to frame my life and the way I’m living it. If in some crisis I were to be snuffed away, what am I leaving here?
But when I get to thinking on this track, I always circle around to the same place: people who think about dying aren’t thinking about living, so I do my best to cut it out. But then I get to thinking about the institutional ways that we think about death. I think about the way death is dangled in front of people like a carrot. Heaven is a big reward. Whoever scores the most points gets the biggest carrot. I’m not here to refute the existence of heaven. It isn’t really my business, and to be honest I don’t think it matters if it is there. No matter what you believe happens when you die, it doesn’t mean that you have to live your life obsessing over it. It only serves to suppress a persons will to live to concern ones self with dying. That might seem hypocritical of me to say given the deadly hymn that I just concocted, but the point of the song was to come to that conclusion. That’s why the song is less than two minutes long; that’s about as long as anybody should think about death before getting back to the business of living.
lyrics
Good God, I’m gonna die some day
I’m gonna be reduced to ashes
There’s no choice
It is a passage we all face
Good God, It is a funny thing
That the more you learn what life is
Closer comes the reaper’s scythe
It ain’t OK
Good God, were I to die today
A means of someone else’s ends
Sincerely I would be offended in my grave
Good God
Good God, there’s something I should say
The stages that we have invented
To convince ourselves of heaven
Ain’t it strange?
It is an awful thing
To distract ourselves from life
Ensuring death would be alright
It ain’t OK
Good God, were I a better man
I wouldn’t be afraid of dying
‘Cause my loose ends would be tied up
And I’d say Good God