Meltzer: A Dying Whore Just Like the Rest

I somehow slumbered (a sure sign of my own wilting mindscape and coagulating blood vessels) by the 2003 release of my literary hero (and ofttimes personal guru) Richard Meltzer’s Da Capo Press book length rant about his own impending geezerdom, Autumn Rhythm (“Musings on time, tide, aging, dying, and such biz”), and having recently been gifted said tome, found myself curled over in the hardy-har-har position more often then not. Meltzer (once among the greatest rockcrits right alongside Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, and a coupla other more seriass types) has long since set his piercing gaze at the vagaries of pop culture in general and at the general descent of human (particularly American) behavior, all the while banging out his written explorations with his own brand upon the brain literal stylistics, a giddy and rambunctious chomp-and-whomp of howling CAPITALIZATION'S, bending ellipses, slangarama, dovetail poetics, and randomly edifying lists. Meltzer is the hairiest of navel gazers, both goofily egofied and outrageously self-examinitive, yet always resoundingly hilarious. Chapter titles alone tell what you need to know: “Sick Person’s Car,” “Dust,” Goodbye Porkpie Cravat,” “Person Who’s Dead,” “The Old Fuckeroo.”
Then again, here’s the real deal, from the chapter the book‘s title is drawn from, “Autumn Rhythm”, from a sub-section entitled “Irrelevant”:

A simultaneous mass exit, like the whole world going down in one fell swoop---“Armageddon,” “Holocaust,” “nuketime U.S.A.,” whatever you want to call it—is terrifying in no small part because it would make all of our individual deaths irrelevant, rob them of their uniqueness---a bogus uniqueness to be sure, but one forever seen as crucial to the projected end gestalt. (You’re born alone, you die alone—that old chestnut.)
“See here how everything leads up to this day,” sang the Grateful Dead in 1970, speaking of an old man’s day of dying, his lying in pain (for passerby’s amusement) as his sole final anything. With world snuffout, personal agony has no moment, and nobody lies dying, everybody just DIES…ceases to be…is and summarily ISN’T…and nothing else is, or was, ever again, ever…even words aren’t, and weren’t.
The thought of dying young---“before your time”---in such a universal termination is one grimly unacceptable excruciation. To be over 45, let’s say, or 50---to already be in the “death zone”---and be faced with imagining that same annihilation is quite another. To have toiled and moiled through a lifesworth of delusions, for an approximate –minimum full-life’s duration, and have it add in a flash to undifferentiated molecules on the slag heap of undifferentiated nothing—now THAT is a frightening outcome to grabble with.
If for no other reason that to serve as an exemplar, let me get fatuously personal: to be forced to surrender the concept of FUTURE, and of strangers not born, their grandparents not yet born; finding delight (or finding anything) in my silly writings; to be in the same breath abandon, after so long and foolishly embracing something as absurd as the notion of works (and words!) that OUTLIVE MEN…well…fuck shit pissgodfuckingdammit…tell me about it, okay?