The Resurrecting Man
I've always loved the idea of grandiose returns: the impossible redemption of character, the refusal of a concrete truth, the negation of never again. But I'm not the only one. For some it was the story of the dying-and-rising frat king Dionysus, or the world's first mass-timescale quantum leaper, Zarathustra, who the Christ man thought he could plagiarize, or any number of the characters who are, in all reality, just flaky leftovers in the denouement of a cosmogonic myth.
As a kid, when every week would condense the contents of a decade, and thereby when every daily showing of Hey Dude represented a major shift in the zeitgeist, I would impatiently wait for that episode that I hadn't seen in a lifetime of months. The one where Ted came back. The one where my childhood archetype returned to center stage to reclaim the girl and the friends that he'd lost, all of them shocked, intoxicated on emotion, all of them apologizing to their slow-burning optimism for being so easily led into the dark.
"Where've you been?"
"We were worried sick."
"How dare you do that to us."
"We're so happy, so happy to have you back."
"Never do that again."
With all of these tales (I'm sure you have your own special one), of course it's easy to go along with believing that the word End is a contradiction to the fundamentals of existence, that there's healing after the destruction we bring upon ourselves, that everything is irreversible, that outcomes are ephemeral, and therefore choice is best left to recklessness.
Because we are capable of becoming our very own Gods in the Machines.
We forget the fact that Andy Kaufman hasn't crashed the Tonight Show in the last twenty-seven years. We ignore the fact that Tupac Shakur is in North Carolina, underground, but definitely in no state to record. And we even deny the fact that The Sheik is currently spread lightly throughout the electron content of the Indian Ocean. Amongst the good, the arguable, and the wicked, none of the powerful ones truly go away. So what else would a megalomaniac believe?
Tomorrow my death simulation recurs, and I'll emerge a healthy deity with the god-graced arrogance to do the whole fucking thing all over again.
As a kid, when every week would condense the contents of a decade, and thereby when every daily showing of Hey Dude represented a major shift in the zeitgeist, I would impatiently wait for that episode that I hadn't seen in a lifetime of months. The one where Ted came back. The one where my childhood archetype returned to center stage to reclaim the girl and the friends that he'd lost, all of them shocked, intoxicated on emotion, all of them apologizing to their slow-burning optimism for being so easily led into the dark.
"Where've you been?"
"We were worried sick."
"How dare you do that to us."
"We're so happy, so happy to have you back."
"Never do that again."
With all of these tales (I'm sure you have your own special one), of course it's easy to go along with believing that the word End is a contradiction to the fundamentals of existence, that there's healing after the destruction we bring upon ourselves, that everything is irreversible, that outcomes are ephemeral, and therefore choice is best left to recklessness.
Because we are capable of becoming our very own Gods in the Machines.
We forget the fact that Andy Kaufman hasn't crashed the Tonight Show in the last twenty-seven years. We ignore the fact that Tupac Shakur is in North Carolina, underground, but definitely in no state to record. And we even deny the fact that The Sheik is currently spread lightly throughout the electron content of the Indian Ocean. Amongst the good, the arguable, and the wicked, none of the powerful ones truly go away. So what else would a megalomaniac believe?
Tomorrow my death simulation recurs, and I'll emerge a healthy deity with the god-graced arrogance to do the whole fucking thing all over again.