Richard Pryor, age 65, passed on last Saturday.
Ironically enough, the DVD most prominently featured on his website is I Ain't Dead Yet M*therF@ck%r!
Sure enough, most of us will at some point attempt to both qualitatively and quantitatively apply some metric to the net sum of our lives. What will we leave behind?
(More on this topic later):
Immortality, even for those of us who don't buy into afterlives, heavens and hells, and reincarnations, does still exist. Oh yes.
Of course, as with all things - some to a greater, and some to a lesser extent.
And in the case of Richard Pryor, we see an undeniable and profound social immortality, and an equally far-reaching and successful familial one.
Pragmatically, Pryor leaves behind him no less than seven children to walk the earth in his wake - insuring his legacy (in its most basic biological terms) will live far into the future.
Socially, he fearlessly shattered doors that had been locked and left alone - he approached race and rage and culture and hate and pain - and extracted a confessional brand of comedy that was as entertaining as it was searing. He leaves behind him a truly expansive and important body of work, that literally was so charged and so biting and so impossible to ignore, it changed the very fabric of contemporary social perception.
He ain't dead, m*otherf@ck%r.
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