poke the corpse

Allow me to backtrack a little to a few days past.

My mother gets odd mail, which I blame as much on her tendency to give random donations to equally random charities -- a check here, a pair of old shoes there -- and her apparent inability to distinguish between junk mail and real mail. She has a reverence for the written word that borders on the pathological. Kami, she reminds me from time to time, means both "paper" and "god," though using different characters and with emphasis on different syllables.

While she understands the concept of fiction and enjoys it as much as the next person, there is an odd disconnect in her mind between that and false advertisement, for instance. Context no longer applies when it comes outside of a book. Sometimes it doesn't even apply when it comes within a book. Articles in The National Enquirer are just as likely to prompt anxious inquiry as the most carefully researched article in the New York Times, with little discrimination between the two. An explanation that one is fiction and one is subjective fact meets with polite skepticism: why, when words are so important, would anyone write down lies? Did you see, Yuhri, that there was a baby born with two heads in Texas to a woman who was abducted by aliens?

I worry what will happen when she starts getting penis-pump spam. There's a conversation I really don't want to have.

As I say, my mother gets odd mail. A few days before we left, I flipped through a stack of envelopes on her kitchen counter, more out of a lack of anything to do than any real curiosity. From time to time, she still gets mail meant for me, mostly requests for money from my alma mater and my fraternity's non-profits, or magazines from the alumni associations of the same.

It was the envelope that caught my eye. Rather, it was the text on the corner of the envelope that caught my eye. There's just something about the phrase, "Free," when linked to the phrase, "pre-paid cremation" that strikes a body.

A living body, that is. One that has received that particular offer in the mail.

"Mom," I said. "You get weird mail."

It is true that my mother is not, shall we say, in the first blush of youth; she qualified to get social security checks a few years ago, and waves her senior citizen credentials with all the enthusiasm of a nun displaying her very first syphilis-positive diagnosis. Nonetheless.

"--She got what?" Sako said. "How come I never get those kinds of offers?"

It is true that any business has the right to advertise, and probably needs to in this day and age. Also true that death is a multi-billion dollar industry, and there's a lot of competition for those dollars.

Nonetheless.

My mother, who thinks happily and morbidly about death at the drop of a hat, hardly needs the reminder from an outside source. She is given to reminding her children about the arrangements for her burial and disposition of her effects, a reminder of mortality that we, her children, neither want nor need -- particularly since she usually accompanies those reminders with the hopeful remark that the world will probably end before that, anyway, and have we made emergency plans? My sister can usually answer yes, while I must usually answer no, a sure fire way to kick off a lecture about the importance of being prepared for all eventualities. I do not deny the truth of that, but after all, the end of the world is customarily accompanied by annihilation and sudden death; as I have told her a couple of times, I'm not entirely sure what a water purifier would do for me if the seas (for instance) turned to blood and rose up to blot us off the face of the earth.

"Well, you might get thirsty," Mom says, which makes sense in her mind, if not in mine. Then again, she has a less Biblical concept of Apocalypse.

I'll maybe talk about that some other time.

In retrospect, it's possible I'm more annoyed at the combination of the two words, "free" and "pre-paid" than I am by the offer itself. It seems to indicate a lack of commitment to the concept of "free," or at the very least, a lack of understanding. I'm not entirely sure I would want to entrust my corpse to someone unable to grasp such a basic concept. If "free" poses such a difficulty, what trouble, then, might they have with "fire?"

I am resigned to funereal urns occasionally sounding a rattle when you shake them. I'm a little more dismayed by the thought that they might squish.

The writers' strike these past two months is impacting us in the way where we now watch DVDs instead of TV. In many ways, this is actually worse; the addictive quality of starting a full series -- like Babylon 5 -- wherein you know that you have access to the next story in the arc available and ready to hand and all you have to do is select the next chapter....

Let's just say that the Guy and I have spent a lot of time on the couch these past couple of weeks.

Jazz, meanwhile, has pinged me with this small jewel, a blogger who not only links to youtube tracks of one of my favorite canceled television shows, Cupid, but actually goes through the episodes one by one.

If he could find just find recordings online for Remember WENN, my cup would runneth over.