Hitchens and Cancer – A Swashbuckle

Christopher Hitchens – or, if you prefer, in reverse: Hitchens, Christopher – had a cancer living him, cancer of the esophagus, which he both provoked and tried to decimate with the ancient remedy of whiskey – known for its healing power amongst atheists and anti-theists (aparently, this doesn’t hold the same crystaline-aura-cleansing powers for the agnostics, who seek out the haughty and plush sensations of an I.P.A. rather than the ammunition-wielding gut-head-nuts-punches of hard alcohol), for whom (go back to before the initial parentheses if you are confused) he was a great icon and leader, waving an invisible flag of the Hitchens God: a non-god (also invisible). Usually, atheists weep from their penises and vaginas – these be the hedonistic and/or existential tears of whiteness and stickiness – but on the day that Christopher Hitchens’ cancer got the best of him, by recruiting pneumonia, these “God is Dead” shouters wept the conventional way.

“But, don’t cry, godless Hitchens Atheist,” hushed the omniscient nothingness to the masses. “He died with a sword in hand.”

Christopher Hitchens’ health had been on the decline for some time, and while he was never going to stop hating religion and drinking Scotch whiskey all night long - as he was so instructed by his favorite Steely Dan song – he knew that the worst was on its way and was, in fact, inside him, so this was Hitchens on cancer: “Build up that wall between yourself and the cancer!” He began to try to separate. This began simply by misspelling his name, slowly but surely, by starting with the last vowel, thus: “Christopher Hitchins” – a simple, but bold first step in removing himself from himself, though ultimately not enough. Between being drunk and dying and reserving an allotment of time specifically for flipping off a likeness of Christ on the cross that he himself had drawn, he had little time for the separation. Until one day, in the bathroom, Christopher Hitchens’ cancer finished the job of division and removed itself from the esophagus, unsheathing an ornate sword in the bloody process. Poised for the violent embrace of war, Hitchens’ cancer held the rapier in its tumorous hands, pointing at our antitheist’s nose, as if to say “en garde” (knowing full well that if it were to as-if-say anything else, presuming to debate Hitchens, it would lose such a battle, but a battle of blades, this little shit-bird cancer could possibly win).

Being an advocate of all things related to the death of man, all things that bring man closer to the proof of no afterlife, Chris Hitchens naturally had his own sword in his gloomy abode. In fact, he had at least three swords and up to nine daggers in each room of the house and, daily, Hitchens would double check and do a “head count” on his deadly tools of deathly destruction. Being that this unlikely event was happening on the terlet (toilet), he naturally went for the small sword he kept staved away in the terlet (toilet) tank (tank), flipping the porcelain lid off in a flash, shattering into white embers of non-fire on the bathroom floor, scattering a sharpness of sweepings amongst the carcinoma’s poisonous “feet”.

At this point, it was on: Hitchens vs Hitchens! A dual to end almost all duals. Sparks flew as they commenced to bang their sharp, metal phalluses together. One fighter on the terlet (toilet), the other a pulsing mutation “holding” a sword 50 times larger than the warrior itself. It would have made quite a fun postcard had a photographer been passing by Hitchens’ bathroom (as they often had). But we know how this battle ends, do we not? With the tip of a sword embedded in Christopher Hitchens’ pneumonia riddled lungs. In this final sad moment, with his final pathetic breath, the words:

“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof,” Christopher Hitchens quotes himself here. A curious and cryptic message to an earless tumor, but cryptic of what?

Alas, the battle is over. Fought, but not won – the latter more important than the former.

What now after Hitchens’ death: it is true that while alive he was best known for his patented Hitchens’ debate your face off skills, those illustrious Hitchens’ YouTube appearances (oh, he went viral; oh, it’s a fact), and of course his Hitchens’ author works, which are called “books” or “page-toothed wisdom mouths” (these Christopher Hitchens books include, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” and “God Is Not Great” [in which he tried to dispell the popular rumor that God was indeed “great”]), but Christopher Hitchens’ true legacy will remain to be his uncanny resemblance to the great actor Roger Allam, who played the character of Royalton in the best film ever made, Speed Racer.

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