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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Dead man’s watch always there to remind me of my own mortality

By David McElroy · February 3, 2015

Watch-closeup

When I was about 10 years old, I saw a dead man right after his car had been hit by a train. It happened near where we lived at the time in Anniston, Ala. I’ve never gotten that image out of my head.

We lived away from the city and suburbs, out in a little community called Choccolocco. At the turnoff from the main road to get to our house, there was a railroad crossing. We came upon it one afternoon after an accident had happened. We had never before stopped at an accident, as far as I remember, but since my father worked for the safety department of Southern Railway, he had a reason to check it out. And I think he also wanted my sisters and me to be very aware of the danger of being unsafe around trains.

I still remember the unnatural stillness of the accident scene. Even though there were people standing around watching, everyone seemed dead silent. The man’s body was placed onto a stretcher to be taken away.

As the ambulance attendants walked the body toward a waiting vehicle, they had to pass within inches of where I stood. I could have reached out and touched the body. Right as they passed, the body shifted slightly and the dead man’s arm dangled off the stretcher — right in front of me. On the dead, hairy arm was a watch.

In the surreal vision of my mind’s eye, the arm dangled in front of me for what seemed like an eternity. I saw the second hand still moving on that watch and it’s an image I’ve never gotten out of my head.

The ticking second hand seemed important even to my child-mind, even if I didn’t understand quite why at the time. Over the years, I keep reinterpreting the image of that ticking watch. There’s some sense it represents to me that time ticks away for all of us and that it will keep ticking after we’re dead.

It somehow seems to be a reminder that my time is limited — that I’ll one day be dead when my allotted years and hours and minutes have run out.

I have death on my mind Tuesday night because I got a bad diagnosis for a sick cat at the vet late Tuesday afternoon. My oldest cat, William, has suddenly lost weight and now he’s lost interest in eating. It turns out he has a tumor in his abdomen about the size of a lemon, maybe two inches in diameter by the vet’s estimate.

If the steroid treatments and some kind of new food can help William start eating again, he might have months of good life ahead. If we can’t get him to eat again, I’ll lose him in days. Maybe a week or two at most.

Losing somebody or something I love always makes me think of death and the passing of time, and that’s where my mind has been tonight. Once again, I’m seeing a “watch still ticking on a dead man’s wrist,” to use an oddly coincidental phrase from Steve Taylor’s 1989 song about Jim Morrison.

The tick-tock of that watch is still strong for me. It makes me feel as though time is both a resource and my enemy — and I feel frantic with the feeling that I’m not doing enough to experience love and life while that time ticks away.

I want to experience more of what I want and need before I’m hit by a train or I’m struck down by a disease or my time simply runs out.

As I sit here raging against a coming death for an animal I love, I’m angry and I’m hurt and I’m needy, about things that have nothing to do with William. Some of it is with other people — for times when I feel I haven’t been treated fairly or lovingly — but I’m mostly angry with myself for decisions I’ve made which have cost me time and cost me love.

Without knowing what I’m going to do about it, I sit here in the silence watching the surreal mental image of time on this eternal watch ticking away. And I cry for more time for that dead man — and more time for me.

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Briefly

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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