HIGHLY FICTIONAL PASSINGS

Thoughts about mortality this past week got me thinking. Obviously the anti-social person would prefer to die during a pandemic, because the idea of a lot of people attending a memorial service would be horrible. But the antisocial sh*t disturber, on the other hand, relishes the concept. "Do you remember the time Atboth was arrested running down the freeway naked with his upper torso painted blue", Dingo Carruthers will say, "because, as he explained to the judge later "If the invading English were horrified at native bottoms painted blue in Braveheart, then it stood to reason that blue was manifestly the colour of superior adequacy".
And everyone nods their heads. Yep, they remembered Atboth doing that.
Including the traumatized highway patrol men in attendance.
As well as the officer who arrested him at a riot.
Because the tapes hit the news.

At this point I should clarify that Atboth (me) never got arrested for such on incident. But I could have been. Except that I'm too fast, was probably covered in oil at the time and thus hard to seize, and it never happened anyway.

There are no mass gatherings to mourn passings during a pandemic. But after this is over, they may be the dominant social event for a while. The friend who died last week had heart and renal failure. The one three months ago was just severely old. Another one went to hospital for blockage. A fourth man was a cancer survivor who in the end did not survive. None of them were covid victims. But there have been no fond memorials with incidents of wailing and alcoholism, and perhaps there should be.

It is time to create great stories about the dead, and oneself, to seed the future memories.

Give the survivors good reasons to drink.


"Atboth died as he had lived; sozzled behind the wheel of his crimson Lamborghini, outrunning the tax man."

"Like a Parsee, he ate sixty hardboiled eggs at a sitting."

"His strap-on antlers caught fire."

"The short people."

"Rosebud."


A friend passed years ago after going to Russia, getting tattooed all over, and marrying a man half her age. The vodka got to her. Her young widower sold her gun collection and retired to Saint-Tropez. We still talk about her and her minor peccadilloes. We will help her daughter follow in her mom's footsteps. Those are some mighty big high heels to fill.




==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================