"And die young"
Kill Hannah - Kennedy
Around 2011 I started watching Christopher Hitchens videos online, in my usual meandering, aimless fashion. By 2012 I'd grown to admire him enough that I eagerly looked up what he'd been doing lately. As should happen, what he'd been doing lately was dying, at 62 years old.
In the early 2000s I first read Cat's Cradle then Slaughterhouse Five. About a year after reading A Man Without a Country, just as I my mind was wandering back to the topic of Kurt Vonnegut, the morning news decided to ruin my breakfast by announcing his death. At least he made it past the average lifespan for a male in the developed world, at 84.
One of my favorite movies has remained Whisper of the Heart. Immediately after seeing it fifteen years ago I looked up the director to see what other movies he'd headed. None. Yoshifumi Kondo died after directing the one flick. He was 47.
And speaking of anime, after seeing Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika and Paranoia Agent I was eager to see what Satoshi Kon was doing next. Dying at 46, of course.
I just finished the game Divinity: Original Sin and I've been gathering notes for a post about it. As one of its positive aspects I was planning to praise the Divinity series' composer, whose superior work had stood out to me even while playing the otherwise dull aRPG grind Divine Divinity. So I finally beat the final boss, ran my victory lap and the credits rolled.
"In loving memory of Kirill Pokrovsky."
Man oh man, by this point in my life I had a pretty good inkling who that must be. 53 years old.
(Incidentally, for the love of Apollo and Marsyas both, someone check Paul Romero's pulse! He's exactly 53 now.)
If I'm about to look up a name who's impressed me, I'd give even odds he just recently kicked the bucket in middle age. Hell, I was a teenager in the '90s, and arguably the defining moment of our shift in youth counterculture from punk and grunge to goth was Kurt Cobain's suicide at 27. Edgar Allan Poe made it to 40 before winding up dead in a ditch. Literally. And as prissy as the bastard was, that would NOT have been the way he wanted to go.
The good die young damnit. Good news for me. I'm a worthless piece of shit and I'll never create a single thing worth mentioning. I'll outlive the lot of ya! Haaahahahahahaha!
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