living every day as if it were your last

Popular sentiment holds that for the maximum whoosh!!! zip!!! bang!!! of unbridled happiness you ought to live every day like it’s your last. “you might get hit by a bus tomorrow, so live every day like it’s your last!” bellow the smarties. yeah, swell. There is only one problem with that advice, if the day you are living as if it were your last turns out to not in fact be your last… Well then that unbridled happiness you were shooting for will likely get somewhat dampened by a little thing called repercussions.

Seriously. If today were your last, your honest to goodness sure as shit last, what kinds of things would you do? I know that unless you are a freakishly lucky (or on the flip side a particularly empty and twisted) individual you would most likely not go into work. that is unless you went in specifically for the pleasure of shooting off your mouth and instructing certain personages to take and shove particular things. you’d become all over confident and blustery “ha ha! It’s over for me! No more fear!” in such a state you’d surely say things that were you to continue living you’d regret.

If you aren’t the angry vengeful type, but rather the whiney bloodless type, you might go into work anyway to flaunt your ultimate un-toppable woe.

Coworker: “man I can’t believe it’s only 1 o’clock, this day sure is dragging, I’m sooo stressed, I need a vacation!”

you: “oh yeah? Well I’m dead as of tomorrow. Yeah that’s right! Finished, kaput, over, worm food. today is my last day. You think your stressed?! How’s dead for a vacation?”

you’d go around the office from desk to desk greedily trumping every other sad sack story, awash in the phony emotional solidarity only familiar strangers can provide. Not very dignified to tell the truth and when you turned up at work the next morning still alive those coworkers who nodded and offered the 3 second workplace sad-face of empathy would turn on you, quick-like. No fun that.

if you were like most people you’d probably just blow off work all together thinking “today’s my last!  Alea iacta est! Carpe Cerevisi!” and when it turned out not to be your last? no big deal really. you missed a day of work. So what? Sure. sure. until you awoke the next morning thinking “today’s my last!  Alea iacta est! Carpe Cerevisi!” and blew off work again to drink ol’ english in your underwear on the fire escape. et-cetera. after a few years of this you might start feeling a bit worse for wear. I hear food scrounged from dumpsters can result in some serious heartburn.

Ok, enough about work. What else might you do if you determined to live today like it were your last? Massive doses of ecstasy, crack, or heroin? a cocktail of all three chased with a bucket of white lightening? a bit of comparison shopping for say, oh i don’t know, cryonics labs? X-treme sports thrill seeking? x-tremely filthy unsafe and unseemly debauchery? gratuitous violence? a bit o’ murder? some rape? a nice assassination? massive binge eating? enjoy an evening of lung crushing chain smoking? dinner and a movie? streak through the city streets? uncontrollable weeping? streak through the city streets while weeping uncontrollably? suicide bombing? some solemn “making of amends?” some pissed off insult hurling? cozy up with a nice short book? a long impassioned bout of deity bargaining? some seriously bitter expletive laced deity cursing? a long impassioned bout of deity bargaining followed immediately by some seriously bitter expletive laced deity cursing? take a massive dump in the middle of the street? pick out a nice outfit and shine your shoes? silent desperation? paperwork?

sounds pretty awful all-in-all. most of it would get old if you happened to do the overwhelmingly probable thing statistically, which is continue living. (damned extended, though finite, life-span gettin’ in the way of our passionate seizing of the day!) not to mention that fact that if you lived every day the way you’ll most likely be actually living on your last day you’d find it pretty uncomfortable i think- all those needles and i.v. drips and pill cups and bed pans really get in the way of the naked, full penetration, acid enhanced, bungie jumping.

perhaps “living every day as if it were your last” isn’t such a sensible life plan? after all it’s just a prettied-up way of saying “desperate” and desperate people, like many drug addicts or any number of criminal types tend to get locked in very unfriendly places called jails. screw that. society is not kind to the desperate and hence fearless. “but jaime, why are you being so literal? it’s a poetic sentiment!” alright. fine it’s a poetic sentiment. perhaps a better one would be “live every day like it’s your first.” innocent, not yet bitter and jaded and damaged, simple, open, not yet indoctrinated, curious! “but jaime on your first day you are completely helpless! that would be an awful way to live every day.” i thought you said it was all poetics? make up your mind damn it.

anyhow i’m not really qualified to dole out wisdom of any sort on this subject. why? well, long ago i misheard the popular sentiment of “live your life as if every day were your last.” it was a small error really, perhaps an ambulance or fire truck was going by at the time, but what i heard was: “live every day as if it were the last.”

the rest is somewhat repetitive history.