testament

I might be dead when you read this, whether tomorrow, in a decade, or perhaps even a century. I have no intention of going until I’m killed by death, and if the corporate-owned media reports my demise as a suicide they’re lying. But if Neil Gaiman is right, Death is a lady, and the lady will do as she pleases and come for me in her own sweet time.

Seriously, though: since I don’t know when I’ll be obliged to make my exit, there are a few things I’d like known.

• starbreaker.org is currently hosted on Nearly Free Speech.
• If practical, I will attempt to set up a trust that will keep the site online after my death.
• My wife, Madam Catastrophy, will get access to all of my online accounts when my time comes. I hope she’ll still care enough about me to find some way to preserve and disseminate my work.
• I mean to write my own farewell post as a “draft” and create a target in my website’s makefile that will copy my swan song into the appropriate directory, build the website, and upload it. Then again, this "testament" page might suffice for the purpose.
• The Wayback Machine periodically crawls portions of my website.
• This website has a public git repository. Anybody who wants to is welcome to clone it. Its contents are freely available for non-commercial use with attribution.
• In addition, I provide a UNIX tape archive containing the latest versions of everything on starbreaker.org. If Zip archives are more convenient, that too is available.

I hope that my work on starbreaker.org will be widely mirrored, but that depends on you. I also hope that at least one university might care to grab a copy on the off chance that some scholar might find something I’ve written worth study. However, all of that will be out of my hands once I’m gone. I’m not too worried about it either way, to be honest. The world managed reasonably well for billions of years before I showed up. It will probably manage tolerably well for billions more after I’ve snuffed it.

But if you hear that I’ve gone, don’t bother crying for me. I had a better life than many, and got most of what I had wanted. Besides, I’ll be too dead to care, so don’t waste a second of what time remains to you mourning me. After all, Bill Hicks might have been right about all of this being just a ride. And for me, the ride will be over. Maybe I’ll get back on it in the future, or maybe I’ll decide that once was enough.

If you must acknowledge my departure, here’s how I want you to do it: Don’t worry about the fucking internet. Eat, drink, be merry. Love your spouses. Play with your children. Run wild beneath the sun with your dogs. Let your cats curl up in your laps. Sing and dance skyclad beneath the moon and stars. Indulge in public fornication. Destroy your idols. Burn the churches down. Raze every prison to the ground. Smash the state. Seize the means of production. Shout at the Devil, curse God, and live free.

Do everything I’m no longer around to do. Do everything I didn’t have the balls or the chance to do. Don’t just live large, live loud. Maybe I’ll even hear you in whatever afterlife ends up taking me, be it Limbo, Tartarus, Sheol, Diyu, Yomi, Naraka, Hel, the Summerlands, or even Valhalla (do Valkyries bang their heads to Viking metal?).

Then again, I might be busy getting to know some of the most interesting people in history. I could give Socrates shit for drinking that hemlock, for starters, and see if Nefertiti and Cleopatra really were all that. Maybe I’ll see what Tallulah Bankhead thinks of writers who do know how to spell ‘fuck’. Maybe talk math with Hypatia and Pythagoras, or pass some time kicking the likes of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Henry Kissinger, and Dick Cheney in the nuts — assuming the millions they’d harmed in life had already had their turn; if not, I can wait because for me it would be principle, but for them it’s personal. Hell, I could ask Marcus Aurelius what thinks of all the techbros masturbating to his Meditations, though I suspect he’d take that in stride. And I know just what to ask Fred Phelps: Where is your God now, asshole?