ENTER THE DRAGON

I’m not really sure this post is metal.  You can be the judge.

The Seattle Times reminded me this morning that actor and martial arts icon Bruce Lee would have turned 69 yesterday but for his untimely death in 1973 at the age of 32.  He was born in San Francisco and grew up in Hong Kong, but he moved to Seattle in 1959 and spent 3 years at the University of Washington where he met his wife.  He’s buried in Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery on Capitol Hill.

Next to his grave is the grave of his son Brandon Lee.  Brandon died in 1993 at the age of 28 from an accidental shooting during the filming of The Crow, in which he starred as an undead rock musician bent on revenging his own death and that of his fiancee.  (The Crow is a cool movie, by the way, and featured songs from bands like Pantera, Helmet, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine.) Brandon was to be married 17 days after he died.  His tombstone is inscribed with a quote he liked from the writer Paul Bowles, which had been printed on the wedding invitations:

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless…”