Comments on: People Start to Die

By: Trevor

Trevor — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:57:23 +0000

Aww, cheer up John! Didn’t you yourself say this was all going to change somewhere down the line in your review of The Elementary Particles? Sure, you’ll likely still die before it happens – as will everyone reading this – but never count out humanity’s fight against the “bad miracle.”

By: Eric Fyfe

Eric Fyfe — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 05:03:34 +0000

John Dolan is one of my favorite writers. The best writers are Dolan, Ames, and Philip K. Dick. They all came out of the Bay Area and they all spoke the truth.I’ve read a lot of Dolan’s work and he
was right about everything when it came to literature.

I look at it this way. It’s all about interptation; This reminds me of The Albert Camus novel The Outsider. Both writers were trying to convey the pathos of the athiest man.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:44:19 +0000

I don’t really see the point in this article. But it seems that for the average eXhole it doesn’t matter: John Dolan writes something, so let’s all drool over it! Are we going to die? Really? Oh no, now this must be the most important part of life, let’s focus on it, let’s all be morose fuckers like some emo kids. And then let’s go through some religion-criticism 101. Pfuh. Schopenhauer, pathetic. All of his stuff has soundly be refuted as anti-life nihilism that doesn’t get you anywhere by Nietzsche anyway. And for all the talk of death, and life having no point and all, well, you live in the US, get yourself a gun and paint the bathroom a more lively colour. Or is everyone above that, is that too minor, are we waiting for the nuclear winter to wipe us all out? Fuck me.

I smell simple mid-life crisis. Dolan is 54, was recently laid off unceremoniously from his university job and feels he’s at an end-station of life. No wonder he comes up with all this nihilistic crap. If he really feels that way, I suspect the eXile will come up with an obituary soon.

The world is a crappy place, but I think a truly great person is above all the misery and stupidity, and strives to be the best. That means focusing on art, so you can leave something permanent of beauty to the world, or try to become someone extremely powerful and use that power to improve the world. Don’t be a nihilistic asshole, it leads to nothing. And if you are, just rid the world of yourself so the rest of us doesn’t have to listen to your nihilistic whining.

By: mitchell porter

mitchell porter — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:23:05 +0000

It’s not immortality – in the eye of eternity, it’s just a bandaid – but I thought I’d put in a word for… stem cells. Most of the ways that people die right now are only possible for a society and a species still in a state of technological backwardness, biologically speaking. Poets of mortality won’t be out of a job, people will still die; but the sensibility attached to illness and death is going to look a little different when you can regrow every organ from scratch.

By: lzzrdgrrl

lzzrdgrrl — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:52:54 +0000

XDDDDD…….

You notice how certain animals don’t breed well when in captivity. They sit around and get all fat and listless. Without the promise of Eternity, human beings do pretty much the same thing as well. Plus, we have cable …….

By: Grim

Grim — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 06:55:20 +0000

Damn that’s grim.

What you have written is exactly the lightning bolt of horror and gloom that struck me after watching my father die. I was useless for months, utter horror.

Awful.

BUT.
We are on a ball of dirt orbiting a big ball of fire in the middle of nothing…
So, with this in mind, you never fucking know what may come of you when the body fails. Newtons collection of bodily experience could be soaring the cosmos while communicating with a part of darwins.

YOU never fucking know.

By: tom

tom — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:36:55 +0000

Lucy might be wrong, Charlie B. might be right, but at least Lucy is testing the system.

To the above commenter: Calvin and Hobbes do tend to embrace life more.

There’s the one where Calvin is standing on top of the hill and says that he likes toboggans more than he like runner sleds.

Hobbes asks why and Calvin replies, because you can’t steer.

By: ibtrippen

ibtrippen — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:56:28 +0000

Damn Dolan, did someone important to you die recently? I’m sorry.

By: Joe Jackson

Joe Jackson — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 01:55:52 +0000

Michael . . . DEAD?

When?

How?

Watermelon on the house!!

By: booltox

booltox — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:01:00 +0000

I came here to say that once more Doaln has proven his worth as a writer. I’ve read it four times, each time laughing out loud at his description of the images of Newton and Darwin – although Darwin is misread by an equally trouble sort. All of the other comments are crap from either flatterers or blunted idiots. Nobody cares about your opinions, Dolan can write you cant, he alone gets to talk here. Except the story about Bush’s funeral from Ofrasr, that is just fucking funny.

By: Ofrasr

Ofrasr — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:19:52 +0000

When W. Bush died we all cried. I don’t know why,we just did. A friend of mine studied with one of his daughters, was maybe close to her to be unofficially invited to the ceremony. The group was split into male and female parts. Then two mugs and two large cisterns on wheels were set forth under the table. Men masturbated to the mug and poured to their cistern, women peed and poured urine in theirs. At the end there was a preach told how Jews are always robbed by the female race, a couple of bitches were shot right on the spot. Then the rain came.

By: limaxophobiac

limaxophobiac — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:37:04 +0000

The fear of death: Bascially the fear of death is based on the fact that you identify with ‘your’ physical body (or in the case of those of us who aren’t planning to die all that soon, our future physical bodies, which aren’t the same), so the sulution is simply to identify with something else (identifying with nothing at all is really hard to do).

By: limaxophobiac

limaxophobiac — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:17:23 +0000

>>>Paul Yarbles

It’s always nice when someone writes pretty mcuh what you were going to say but does it so much more eloquently than you yourself ever would. Which brings me to another point about death (which I feel I have to say I have no idea if Paul agrees with):

All those things that make up ‘your’ narrative that you think will be lost when you die, the information that is you, the parts you find somehow imprortant atleast, are in all likelyhood not unique to you, and will therefore not actually be gone with the death of this particular dying animal husk.

(Now you can argue that in time there will eventually be nothing of this left of these things at all as most of astrophysics points to time eventually comming to an ‘end’, but then we can get into the hurdle of the supposed linearity of time, “so it goes” etc.)

By: Providence Wyldecunte

Providence Wyldecunte — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:58:59 +0000

“The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let’s not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we’ve seen without changing one word. When that’s done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That’s work enough for a lifetime.”
…
“To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.”

-Celine ♥♥♥

By: noone

noone — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 06:27:24 +0000

Curses are for dyevs, only words. Real men are with Ivan Karamazov, aren’t they?.. Drag on untill 30 and then smash the cup over the floor

By: brian

brian — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:02:22 +0000

I know I’ll be flamed or this comment.

I used to get depressed when thinking of stuff like this, but then I started reading Teilhard, who pointed out that the evolution of all life is a process increasingly directed by human consciousness. I’m not sure why this makes me feel better – the survival of consciousness is still a dubious possibility – but it does give the universe a purpose: the willful expansion of the noosphere, etc, etc.

Atheism still cannot be refuted rationally, since there is no proof of God, no ground on which to test the groundwork of all reality. There is really neither proof of God nor the ethical insights deriving from God; they cannot be possessed by the mind as data. There is only a rational judgment to be performed, a decision that must be made and cannot be avoided. A refusal to choose is a refusal to trust, a refusal of ventured confidence. Further connecting belief and trust, Hans Küng says that trust in God is, “super-rational, there is no logically stringent proof that reality is real, neither is there such proof of God. The proof of God is no more logically stringent than is love. The relationship to God is one of trust.”

So basically, there are no answers (and there never were), only choices. Consequently, I don’t care much anymore for statements describing ‘Reality’s Ultimate Ground’ – data I might hold in my skull about God and death/life. Instead, I make choices and perform actions to bring about a more just world, trusting that the world is intelligible and meaningful.

By: captain america

captain america — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:48:34 +0000

aaron, best proof i can think of would be to have you drink a big mug o’ hemlock. the exact same physical components that made up your body before would still be there, but something else would be gone. would it be destroyed? maybe, but the seems unlikely to me, in the same way that matter is never really destroyed, just transformed into energy or some other kind of matter.

if that doesn’t seem logical to you, that’s fine. oh, and if you’re depressed, watch this oldie-but-goodie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLYD_-A_X5E

always cheers me up. might even work on dr. dolan.

By: casey

casey — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:10:46 +0000

tl;dr

By: yabadabadoo

yabadabadoo — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:08:06 +0000

Writing this kind of crap does not help you get laid. Everybody remember that. This is what you must take away from this.

By: Homer Erotic

Homer Erotic — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:43:24 +0000

PS: “There is no cure for birth or death [other than] to enjoy the interval.”

–George Santayana