There was a commercial just on where a girl was playing golf with some old guy and she kicked his ass. Although this is unrelated, it made me think about people. And there are a lot of people, six billion of them. More specifically, I guess, people I know. I don't know why, but I've been thinking a lot about people today and dying. Again, two fairly unrelated things. People die, and that's about as rudimentary of a comparison between dying and people you can make.
What's weird is that through all the funerals I've had to go through over the past year and a half, death kinda washed over me. I remember looking at my grandmother at her funeral, and I couldn't think about death. It literally could not happen. My cousins and I would stand around cracking fart jokes, or go into the waiting area and talk about video games. It was like a family reunion, only with a dead person in the other room.
Seeing a dead animal usually freaks me out a lot more than seeing a violent crime on TV, even if it's a real death being reported on the news, not something in a movie. Driving past a deer without its head or a dog with a smashed torso always freaks me out, because that's death. A funeral is something after death, meaning death isn't final. Then the person is put on your mantle if they're in an urn, or sprinkled in a forest or something, or maybe they're just buried underground. At Granny's funeral, she was buried next to my grandpa, but his headstone was covered up by the giant fucking thing that lowers the casket into the final resting place.
For an animal or a piece of roadkill, they're just dead. There was no fanfare. Sometimes, animals will get buried by other animals, but that's instinct. I remember my ex-girlfriend said something when we were in high school about dogs walking away from their owners to die so they won't upset them. That's always been one of the scariest things to think about: having an instinct that tells you to abandon everything and die alone so nobody can find you.
What I have trouble with his the weird dichotomy of human and animal instincts. Creepy science types let people know that our "major difference" between other mammals is our ability to communicate VIA language. A lot of the other characteristics we have are parallels. Death is this odd juxtaposition of everything, though. I've told my parents if I pass before either or both of them do, I want to be cremated and have my remains put into an intake manifold from a Volkswagen or something... for the simple fact that I can't handle tons of people crying. I'd much rather have people stare at "Dust-form Joey" instead of my pruny, pale face and cry. Plus, the thought of rotting and decomposing underground is just scary.
I hate having the belief, "You die and that's it." It's a little uncharacteristic for me because I would usually think of the most asinine scenario, like one I talked about with a friend where I'd just fly out in space on a rocket ship, going in one direction, cackling and becoming increasingly more insane. Just going out into space forever. As cool as it sounds, it's not all that realistic. Which makes the thought of just.... being asleep forever really crappy and depressing. It trumps this theory I came up with as a kid where in death, the last thing you see is burned in your mind, only you see it upside-down.
Moving in a few weeks just makes me think about "Muncie dying," and some of the people that I've met here. I might never see them again. Hopefully, I'll be able to think about bad ass things instead of .... my apartment being upside down forever. That would suck.
What the fuck am I talking about? Woah.
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