Bill Hicks Grows Beyond Earthly Legacy

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Dear God,

I can honestly say that I’m truly at peace. I never would have imagined that I would ever be this ONE with the universe. But there is no need to imagine anymore. I should have died years ago! I’m 1,000-percent “pro-death” now. Sold! Death has opened my mind up to infinite possibilities. But I wouldn’t recommend death for everybody.

For instance, there is this one guy you might know who on the first day of his death went utterly ape-shit. First, he went to Hell. Then he rose from the dead and hung out with his friends on Earth for a while. On top of that, the dude thought he was YOU! He said he wants to return to Earth one day. Jesus, make up your mind, will you? Don’t settle.

Obviously, Jesus should have kept on living in human form on Earth with that attitude. Resurrection is for quitters. You know who also should have lived? Martin Luther King, Jr. The guy just doesn’t appreciate death either. Me? I love it. In the 16 years I’ve been dead, I’ve got two million millennia of killer material, and I do mean killer!

The quality of my new act lays waste to the crap I dreamed up on Earth. I look back at my old stuff and think, “What was I thinking? Why was I so hung up on – say – consumerism or bad music?” I’ve got four hundred thousand years of material just on the African Spurred Tortoise. FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS!!! It’s all funny, too.

From a humanist perspective, I’m living the most beautiful, perfect paradox. Everybody is a virgin, including me, and yet I have fucked everybody I have ever wanted to fuck, and yet there is no time, space, or solid substance. There just is. I’m a particle, a wave, a cup of ice tea, a high-def television set, an aphid, a red dwarf… the list is literally endless!

Now, I hold no grudges against people like George Bush, Tiffany, or Denis Leary. How can I? I’m one with them now, too. Love thy neighbor as thy self? I am my neighbor. In fact, they can live on Earth for forever for all I care because my influence is felt in everything from the microorganisms near the Mariana Trench to the beige pixels at the end of the universe.

Of course, you know what it’s like to be in a billion-billion-billion places at once, but if I had only known the extent of influence I had on Earth within my own limitations, I would have been a much happier person. I just wasn’t as aware of it back then. If I had only smiled more. A smile goes such a long way. It’s so simple. So. Fucking. Simple.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter to me whether people see that new documentary about me: AMERICAN: The Bill Hicks Story. It’s playing at the Dallas International Film Festival this weekend: Saturday, April 10, 7:30 p.m., Angelika Theatre 8; and Sunday, April 11, 10 p.m., Angelika Theatre 6.

The reception it got at SXSW in Austin this year was very flattering, but if you ask me, I’m so beyond my mortal coil it’s not even funny. I’m just not that vain, you know? How could I? I’m dead! And the idea that Russell Crowe would play me in a bio-pic directed by little Opie Taylor. C’mon! Whatever… if they want to get it right, they would wait to cast Jesus as me. Otherwise, fuck off.

Here, There, and Everywhere,
William Melvin “Bill” Hicks