blueswede

death of a comedian

No updates for a month? How'd I manage that? Well you damn
well better get ready, because here comes a month's worth of
shit in one entry!

Last week was going extremely well up through Thursday. In
fact, it was shaping up to be the Best Week Ever. I had my
neck fixed Monday from a minor weightlifting injury from the
previous week, and started feeling much better. Tuesday, I
set a new personal best when I bowled 197. Wednesday was an
easy day, and Thursday I got two classes cancelled. It was
going well, and I felt great. I even thought I might start
to get a little bold in my personal endeavors.

And then it hit me.

Friday morning, I found out that Mitch Hedberg had died late
Wednesday night.

For those who don't know, Hedberg was a comedian. He mostly
did observational comedy, reduced to one-liners, with quite
a few rather inane jokes mixed in. Imagine Jerry Seinfeld,
then imagine if he smoked pot, and that was Mitch.

Mitch Hedberg was one of my favorite comedians, and also one
of the few I'd seen live. I could relate to his style; the
long observational bits mixed in with snappy one-liners, the
free associating, the nonsensical plays on words, all of it
I could relate to my own trains of thought and their regular
derailments. He was a genius.

And now he's gone.

They say celebrities tend to die in groups of three, so our
triad this time seems to be Hunter Thompson, Mitch Hedberg,
and Pope John Paul II. Strange how the most important among
them on the world stage was the least significant to me.

The year has been one of sorrow for the counterculture, with
two great heroes being lost already. I'd like to think that
Mitch would receive the remembrance he deserves, because god
knows HST didn't. And then I remember that the world around
me isn't controlled by my people. It's controlled by those
who would devote more TV time to a kept-alive vegetable than
to the death of a productive human being.

Ours is a world that only respects your death if someone can
make money off of it. And if there's more money in keeping
you alive, they won't even let you die.

I hope the media never gets wind of my last days.