subconscious creativity

I had a dream last night that there was an obnoxious racket emitting from my common room which woke me up. I got out of bed and went in there, still mostly asleep, and saw my housemates and a bunch of other little kids in there singing and clapping and having a good time. I asked them to be quiet or go somewhere else as i'd been asleep and it was five am, and this one, this tall male one, says "i'll make it better--i'll sing you a song. let me get my guitar." i said "thanks very much, but i'd really just appreciate it if you were quiet." and he looks to the kid next to him and says "man, what a brat!" I gave him an evil, evil look and he started convulsing violently, fell on the floor, and promptly turned into a hamster.

Ben, American funeral practices actually date back to old British ones predating any sophisticated means of checking for vital signs. The family of the one assumed dead would put the body on the kitchen table for a night and sit around and see if he'd wake up. hence a "wake." A lot of times this was practice after a night of heavy drinking, as i know i've read several reports of folks waking up with a crippling hangover and everyone in town staring at them. This practice was brought to the US for the most part by Irish settlers, who, by being typically poor, smelly, and unwelcome, were shoved out of every port city in the country and dispersed over the map like a cloud of horny locusts, filling the land with devoutly religious horse thieves. Once we figured out how to find a pulse the practice of the wake gradually became a tradition, even after the poor chap had been embalmed.

That's not to say that all Irish folk are horse thieves. I'm just referring to my family--we got kicked out of Ireland for stealing potatoes, moved to Scotland, where we got kicked out for stealing horses, moved to Texas, where we got kicked out for stealing even more horses, and at least my branch of the family landed in Arkansas, where there's nothing to steal. (somewhere along the line some of us moved to South Carolina and a huge chunk of the family magically became black.)

This same inability to discern living from dead led to "graveyard shifts" in which the cemetery caretaker was required to hover around freshly-buried graves with a shovel and listen out for any not-quite-dead folk. He would have tied a string around one of the corpse's fingers and strung it out to a bell mounted above ground, the idea being that if he moved the bell would ring and he'd be dug up. Though there are reports of this having saved lives (occasionally the same life multiple times), more often than not it just gave rise to stories of caretakers being eaten by zombies.

Interestingly, the Hurricane Katrina disaster shed a new light on our general belief that rotting bodies are dangerous. I'm sure everyone saw pictures the corpses floating around in the bayoux and there was this huge commotion on the part of germophobes everywhere that if we didn't get these bodies out the water would become so toxic that if you got wet you'd get leprosy and explode or something. It took a huge team of doctors and scientists to write a report detailing that no, rotting humans are just like rotting rats and dogs and fish and other creatures that wind up in the water--they'll always be there and they've never really been a problem. The real danger to the water is all the living people without plumbing.

The thing i don't get is that fish poop all the time. A lot of fish get poop confused with food and try to eat it a few times but the fact remains that all of our water sources are full of poop and poop-related contaminants. I've heard some people argue that "oh well people poop is different from animal poop because of what we eat and the e.coli and other bacteria that live in our colons to digest it" but do you seriously believe that an e.coli bacterium would be any less happy in a dog's digestive tract than a human's? and just think of where the meat that goes into dog food has Been. yergh.

We just bury our dead (or get rid of them somehow) because they smell. plain and simple.