Driving home from work tonight I heard on the radio that Matthew Perry died. For those who live under a rock or who are under the age of 30, he played Chandler Bing on the tv show Friends back in the ‘90s. Quite a big deal show.
He died at the age of 54 in his hot tub of either cardiac arrest or drowning or the former precipitated the latter. A guy on the radio said he died “at the very young age of 54. These days 60 is the new 40 after all”.
Thank you radio guy! By your math, I’m only 30 years old then. I’ll take it.
Of course I watched Friends back in the day. You couldn’t not. That was the it show. I watched it because it was on network television only once a week and unless you had a VCR or paid extra for DVR, you had to watch it at the appointed time, 8:00 pm every Thursday, or else you had to wait for summer reruns.
Those were the days.
Nowadays I see Friends t-shirts in the kids section at Target and I’m like these kids don’t even know what Friends is.
I never rocked a Leave It to Beaver t-shirt in 1982. I did know what Leave it to Beaver was though because when you only had six channels and no cable, you watched Leave it to Beaver reruns. You didn’t have a choice. It was either that, go outside and play or God forbid read a book. Oh the horror!
Kids today have so many choices with everything. They aren’t relegated to having to watch old reruns, read a book or even entertain themselves at all. Who needs imagination anymore?
But that’s a conversation for another day.
My conversation with myself tonight, as I was thinking about Matthew Perry was, wow, of all ways to die, he drowned. He was a pained soul who struggled with addiction as revealed in his memoir released almost exactly a year ago.
I’ve noticed a lot of pained people seem to die by drowning.
Coincidence? Let’s take a look:
Aaron Carter – died 2022 – drowned in his bathtub
Whitney Houston – died 2012 – drowned in her bathtub
Jeff Buckley – died 1997 – drowned in the Mississippi River
Dennis Wilson – died 1983 – drowned in Marina Del Rey harbor
Virginia Woolf – died 1941 – drowned in the Ouse River in England (she put heavy stones in her coat pockets and walked into the river)
Piero the Unfortunate – died 1503 – drowned in the Garigliano River in Italy (I mean c’mon, that’s your name, what did you expect?)
What do all these people have in common? They either had some kind of mental health struggle, addiction, or otherwise troubled life. Even our Italian noble friend Piero suffered as his family turned against him and he was exiled. Interesting.
Continuing my conversation with myself about all this, I remembered a dream I had just last night. Yeah, I’m into all that metaphysical stuff – dream meaning, tarot cards, signs, otherworldly delights.
I just can’t fathom that this entire human life thing is only made up of that which we can only see and touch. There HAS to be more – another plane, another realm, another reason, cause or affect for all this bullshit we live in.
Anyway, so in my dream I was on a pier with some no-name person watching a giant commercial airliner start to descend way too quickly. My dream-self said, “hold up, wait a minute, something ain’t right.” Next thing you know, maybe 200 yards from me (in dream mileage anyway) that behemoth plunged into the water like a giant, non-flat rock you erroneously picked for rock skipping.
Kerplunk!
The crash caused this humongous wake of water to rear up and set its sights right on us. I turned to Mr. No-Name, grabbed his hand and said “don’t let go of me when we go down!” I could feel his hand clasp onto mine as the wave thundered over us, pulling us down into the violently churning water.
Then I felt Mr. No-Name’s lifesaving hand slip away.
Next thing you know my dream-self and Mr. No-Name wake up on the pier – drenched, but alive. Wow, we just fucking survived drowning.
Weird.
But not.
In dreams, water represents emotions. And when you dream about an upheaval of water, either the wake from a plane crash, a tidal wave or a storm, it signifies, get this, emotional upheaval in your waking life! Who would’ve thought?
So far, my dreams haven’t been wrong. These last few months of therapy have upheaved me from the inside out. Maybe all that is playing out in my dream.
Dreams are your subconscious’ way of sorting out problems, replaying things back to you, and symbolically sending you messages.
In this particular dream I lived. Hmm…
No such luck though for the previously mentioned over-upheaved persons.
You can’t tell me it’s a coincidence that all these people, clearly wrought with some kind of emotional turmoil, each died being overcome by the one thing that is the biggest representation of emotions – water.
How tragically poetic.
How fucking sad.
How fucking fitting.
Fate can be cleverly morose like that.
I feel bad for these people, their lives overrun for years by such emotional distress that they never seemed to successfully ride the tide. Somehow, someway, their struggles got the better of them, intentionally or not. I feel bad for them, but I fucking get it.
So this is all just an observation I had after hearing some sad news driving home from work one night. It makes you think.
I don’t want to end up drowning in my emotions either figuratively, literally or deathily (okay that might not actually be a word, but you know what I’m saying). Day-to-day life is a hard enough struggle as it is. No one wants to end up at the bottom.
I want to swim strongly past the waves, to the deep part where it’s calm. Fuck I’m already a deep as shit person as it is, at this point I might as well keep going and make it out to more tranquil waters.
If I can face my waves, believe me, so can you. Have you had a similar dream to mine? A dream where you survived utter disaster? Have you had a waking life similar to mine? A life of surviving utter disaster?
Oh, you have? Okay, c’mon, let’s talk about it. I’ll buy our drenched-selves a drink.
Hurricane anyone?
P.S. – A little advice: don’t ever write a memoir too soon. That’s tempting fate.
“I’m not great at the advice. Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?” – Chandler Bing
❤️
CM
10/28/23
