why i'm not afraid of death
Hey! I am starting a newsletter because no one told me to. I have decided to name it “too scared to tell my mom”. I want to start this off by answering some of the inevitable questions:
Question:
Why are you starting a Substack newsletter?
Answer:
I turn 20 in August.
Question:
What do you think you have to offer the world?
Answer:
I’m obsessed with myself and push away everyone I love the most.
Question:
What will you be writing about in your newsletter?
Answer:
Nothing. Shut up. I love you.
If you have made it this far, you are crazy and your besties can’t take you anywhere!
Ok now I will be ____(emotion).
My name is Charlie Zacks and I really hope you know that by now. What you may not know is that my real name is Charles Matthew Zacks. This has had no real impact on my life besides being one of the two truths in my preloaded “two truths and a lie” entry. I am almost 20 which means I can’t get away with being an angsty teen anymore. I’m just “emotionally handicapped” and “stuck in the past”. Whatever! I have been sharing my thoughts online for almost half of my life at this point, in one way or another. It started as EDM songs, moved to ambient music, then indie pop, then emo, and then indie pop mixed with emo, and then poetry (yikes!), then Instagram stories (yikes!!!!), and finally here. I have been told by several people I should write a memoir. What those people don’t know is that I am too in love with the idea of living a mysteriously eventful and chaotic life to let anyone close enough to my writing. I used to write poems, now I write obituaries. Ohhhhh here he goes! With his words! I know that’s what you're thinking, you idea slut.
Did you hear about the Webb telescope pictures? NASA just dropped some new images depicting incomprehensible horrors and beauties beyond remark.
Apparently, this image depicts NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. I don’t know what that is, but in this article it says it depicts “star birth”. Turn on your flashlight on your phone. Note how immediately the light from the bulb hits your eyes. This is because light moves pretty fast. NGC 3324 is apparently 7,600 light-years away. This means it would take 7,600 years (almost 3 million days) for light to reach your eyes from the Carina Nebula. That’s sick! Also- terrifying.
This image depicts stars beginning to exist, or rather, beginning to exist to us. As we expand ever forward into the endless beyond, we are changing what it means for something to exist. What I mean, in stupid fucking idiot terms, is, as we reach further into infinite space, we are able to perceive more of the infinity, thus increasing our catalog of what exists. We can guess that stars are exploding somewhere in the infinity, but now we know about these exact stars in this exact place. In a way, we can reach them. We have met with their light. We said “hello!” and they replied with beauty beyond our comprehension.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the stars. I don’t know much about them scientifically. I believe they are made out of gas. I don’t really know what that means. I think light is energy. Is heat energy? Are they both energy or just results of energy?
Where do the stars get their energy?
Starbucks!
Maybe god is like the stars of NGC 3324. Maybe god is shooting at us at 670,616,629 mph and we’re shooting back at god at 670,616,629 mph and one day we will meet and say “hello!” and god will give us something we were never meant to understand.
The Webb telescope captured an approximation of infinity. Inside your eyes you have more than you will ever know. Zoom in forever and find it’s all black when you look that close. We are not made to understand. We are made to eat and sleep, mostly. The fact that my neurons are doing neuron-like activities at this exact moment is a miracle. When I die, I want to be buried standing. I want to be in the ground naked. I don’t want any casket. I want the soil and the bugs to consume me and turn me into fertilizer and then I can become a daisy that is eaten by a deer that is eaten by a bear that one day will die and return my cells to the Earth from where I came. As we torch our last lands and dry up our last water supplies, remember that your immortality cannot be taken from you. Take a deep breath. You will live in that air. You may not see it, but it is there.
Ok! That is all for my first foray into self-obsession. I love you a lot. Take care of yourself. Remember to brush your teeth fairly often and get your yearly physical. Go on a walk if you can and try and think about things that make you feel okay-happy.
I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on this first newsletter! Email me at zackscharlie@gmail.com ! See ya later.
PS - Please forgive any mistakes in grammar or spelling, my editors are on vacation [they died from bone diseases :( ]