you're beautiful death, I love you

I had a fascination with death from a very early age; an unnatural interest, almost an eagerness to understand what death is, and worse, what it would feel like to die. I was also obsessed with the way other people communicate their feelings about such a taboo subject.
"Goodbye Michelle it's hard to die, when all the birds are singing in the sky," is where it started I think. That Jacques Brel song delivered by Terry Jacks in 1974, when I was about 5 years old. While everyone else was singing the chorus with the altered lyrics about flicking bogies at the sun, I was contemplating suicide.
Then there was Bobby Gentry's "Ode To Billie Joe"; the beautiful song about young BJ throwing himself off the Tallahatchie Bridge (it's strange but until today I always thought Billie Jo was a girl, and I don't know why because it's quite clear from the lyrics it is a boy), anyway, I loved the attention that was given to Billie Joe's demise, the gap he left in everyone's lives and particularly the fact that he was remembered in song... I thought that was so cool; to be remembered like that. I wanted songs written about me.. but instead I wrote songs about death.
I embraced death, never really knowing during those tender years what it actually meant. Death in songs is always romanticised, it is almost glorified, made for an audience of teenagers, who full of self-pity, love nothing more than moaning and pretending to be depressed, in a vain attempt to appear more interesting and therefore more attractive and appealing to the opposite sex.
For me it was always about the music. I love the way songs can change moods, like a mind altering substance, it can plummet you to depths of despair for 3 minutes. The trick is knowing when you've had enough; it was easier in the old days because the needle would lift off the record at the end of the song, now you can leave iTunes on and it will play for weeks, ploughing through a library of wristslashers.
I see death now as a deadline; literally. I want to get everything done that I can before I skip off this mortal coil. If no other fucker will write my requiem, I'll do it myself. Death has made me live. I don't believe in the afterlife, or rebirth or any of this shit. I am sure you have one go at this living lark, and after that nothing. So here I am, and I am not going away.