The Last Will & Testement Of Pig Gut
Did you know that they have morgues on cruise ships?
If you, well not you since you’re here reading this, but someone dies on a cruise ship, they take that body down to a hidden deck that’s a morgue. I know, I know, this sounds like a Snopes entry, but I shit you not, it is true. According to an article I read recently, 91 people have died on cruise ships between 2014 and 2017. Apparently, most deaths are natural, with the most common being from heart attacks. Did you know that when a person dies on an airplane, if there’s nowhere to relocate the body to, like an overhead bin for example, they simply strap the person into a seat and cover them up? Did you know that if someone dies in an apartment all alone, eventually someone else has to come and clean them up? Sometimes there's even a photographer there to capture the event.
Your death, no matter where or when it happens, is an inconvenience to those around you.
When you die, suddenly everything becomes lower on the list of priorities for everyone else, and they all, finally, turn to focus on you. What to do with your remains, how to have a service for you, what happens to all your shit. Suddenly, you’re the most important thing in the world, even if everyone ignored you up to this point. They tell stories about you, talk about your strengths and heap praise onto you like you’re a goddamned beloved celebrity. Then, they put you wherever you’re going and, if you’re lucky, they’ll occasionally look at the photo of you on their mantel or wherever and think of you once every 3 to 5 years. You…are a nuisance. But please try and revel in this fact, because I assure you, being a nuisance is the best way to exist.
🐷
The sooner I realized I actually wasn't important to anyone, not in a real sense that made me happy anyway, the better I actually felt about myself. No longer was I consumed with how to make other people like me, spending time on getting others to think I was interesting or wasting time going to others with my rather inane issues they didn't want to listen to in the first place but couldn't openly admit that because that makes them seem rude. Now, I had all the time in the world to focus on myself, and, okay, for me that wasn't great, but for others it can be exceptionally wonderful. Don't let blog posts from websites like "www.litliving.com" or something (I don't know if that's a real address and I hope to god for the sake of humanity it isn't) try and tell you otherwise; self care IS inherently selfish. And while that may sound terrible, let me ask you...what's so wrong with being selfish?
We're so often demanded to give our attention to others. Think of the children, support our troops, donate to this and that fundraiser. And while two out of three are genuinely positive things with life changing effects (hint, it's the first and third), at some point it becomes exhausting when you realize all of your excessive time and energy is spent on people who are not you. This is the basis behind self care to begin with. Take time for yourself. Set boundaries, limits, do not apologize for doing something solely for you that benefits your mental or physical health. But because the word "selfish" has such negative connotations attached to it, immediately people wanted to state that self care wasn't selfish. But it IS, I assure you. It's actually the definition of selfish. But so what? Who cares? Sometimes being selfish is the only way to continue to be happy. When you spend so much time worrying about others, worrying about your presence amongst others, it can become draining.
Did you know that you don't have to have a will? You can just die and let your family deal with everything. And you know what, you should. It's horrible to spend so much time working on something you won't even reap the benefits of. Die with no plans. Leave no instructions. Make others fight over you. For once in your life, be selfish at the very end and force others to focus on you for a change. Make as much of a mess out of your death as you did out of your life. Leave no bridge unburned. If I'm lucky to die with any money, I'm going to leave it all to my future bird, then give anyone else a bumper sticker that simply reads "You Should've Tried Harder".
Be the nuisance. They made you one anyway. Might as well live up to it while you can.
There was a woman I once read about.
I don't remember her name, I don't remember where I read the article in question, I just remember that she described her job as "corpse photographer". Essentially, what she does is she finds the people who have died alone in their apartments, forgotten about for months at a time, left to rot, and takes pictures of them when someone comes to deal with them. This fascinates me. It fascinates me how much of our culture is surrounded by death, obsessed with death, fearing of death, and how much we mourn the loss of people we never knew over people who know all too well or celebrate the death of people whom we don't personally like simply because their idealogy differs from our own. And I'm not talking about people whose death deserve to be celebrated, like dictators and rapists and homophobes and nazis and what have you. Just general people who think differently than you do.
We all watch ghost hunting shows, we all watch scary gory movies, we all listen to crime drama podcasts and we all love a good serial kill book. Yet when it becomes too real, we start to back away. We want to look at death through a lens of unreality, as a form of entertainment that isn't actually applicable to us ever. This I think is partly why people don't like movies like Hostel or The Blair Witch Project, because, aside from them just not being their cup of tea, they also don't like recognizing that this sort of thing can happen to anybody. That's terrifying. They don't want to confront the fact that, yes, tomorrow it could be you who was stabbed eighteen times in a superstore during a Black Friday sale over a childrens toy they would've stopped liking in 4 months or less. We want death to be entertainment. We want love to be real, but we've turned real love into an unattainable thing because we want it to be like the love we see in entertainment.
It's a sick sad truth, but we don't want to think that death can happen to us, but it can, and it does and it WILL.
The best you can hope for is to be fondly remembered or have a woman who didn't know you be curious enough to take your photo once you're found in your apartment and all your cats have tried eating your face. Because god bless that woman, even then, at least you're interesting to her, and that's a pretty nice way to think about death. She has no ulterior motives. She doesn't want to necessarily capitalize on your demise (though I do seem to recall her saying she wanted to turn these photo collections into a book of some kind). She isn't clamoring after your belongings or your money and she didn't even know you enough to form an opinion on you. She just thinks you deserve to be remembered, simply because you were here. You were part of all of us. And that's goddamned beautiful.
I hate attention. I mean, it should be fairly clear to you all by this point that I'm an introvert, but I'm such a hermit that Howard Hughes would likely think it's a bit much.
The past few years, whenever I've had to spend my birthday with my girlfriends family, or anyone besides her in general, I've specifically asked them not to sing Happy Birthday to me. I don't like getting gifts. I don't like being awarded. I don't like having attention drawn to me whatsoever, not one little bit. I go out of my way to make myself unknown. Yet, at the same time, I'm an artist and a writer, and a part of me craves the idea of existing and being recognized long after I am gone. And what's worse is that death will, instead of finally being the ultimate relaxation for me, the release from the ever lingering worsening state of my mental health and grief, very likely make everyone pay attention to me. The thing I want the most will also come with the thing I want the least, and there's some sick sort of irony for you there.
People I went out of my way not to talk to will talk about me, they will do things for me because it is socially expected of them to do so, or in some cases, legally expected of them to do so, and for a moment, albeit a brief moment, I will have all the attention in the world. At least I won't be around to witness it. Unless being a ghost is real, in which case then I will be around to witness it and this whole ordeal of circular ironic misery will be never ending, but we'll see when we get there I suppose. Some people want to be remembered. They want to be thought about every single day. Me? I'm alright with a glance towards the mantel every now and then. I don't want all that attention anyway, and I get it, you're busy.
You've got a life to live.
Please don't waste it thinking about me.
Be the nuisance. They made you one anyway. Might as well live up to it while you can.
🐷
There was a woman I once read about.
I don't remember her name, I don't remember where I read the article in question, I just remember that she described her job as "corpse photographer". Essentially, what she does is she finds the people who have died alone in their apartments, forgotten about for months at a time, left to rot, and takes pictures of them when someone comes to deal with them. This fascinates me. It fascinates me how much of our culture is surrounded by death, obsessed with death, fearing of death, and how much we mourn the loss of people we never knew over people who know all too well or celebrate the death of people whom we don't personally like simply because their idealogy differs from our own. And I'm not talking about people whose death deserve to be celebrated, like dictators and rapists and homophobes and nazis and what have you. Just general people who think differently than you do.
We all watch ghost hunting shows, we all watch scary gory movies, we all listen to crime drama podcasts and we all love a good serial kill book. Yet when it becomes too real, we start to back away. We want to look at death through a lens of unreality, as a form of entertainment that isn't actually applicable to us ever. This I think is partly why people don't like movies like Hostel or The Blair Witch Project, because, aside from them just not being their cup of tea, they also don't like recognizing that this sort of thing can happen to anybody. That's terrifying. They don't want to confront the fact that, yes, tomorrow it could be you who was stabbed eighteen times in a superstore during a Black Friday sale over a childrens toy they would've stopped liking in 4 months or less. We want death to be entertainment. We want love to be real, but we've turned real love into an unattainable thing because we want it to be like the love we see in entertainment.
It's a sick sad truth, but we don't want to think that death can happen to us, but it can, and it does and it WILL.
The best you can hope for is to be fondly remembered or have a woman who didn't know you be curious enough to take your photo once you're found in your apartment and all your cats have tried eating your face. Because god bless that woman, even then, at least you're interesting to her, and that's a pretty nice way to think about death. She has no ulterior motives. She doesn't want to necessarily capitalize on your demise (though I do seem to recall her saying she wanted to turn these photo collections into a book of some kind). She isn't clamoring after your belongings or your money and she didn't even know you enough to form an opinion on you. She just thinks you deserve to be remembered, simply because you were here. You were part of all of us. And that's goddamned beautiful.
🐷
I hate attention. I mean, it should be fairly clear to you all by this point that I'm an introvert, but I'm such a hermit that Howard Hughes would likely think it's a bit much.
The past few years, whenever I've had to spend my birthday with my girlfriends family, or anyone besides her in general, I've specifically asked them not to sing Happy Birthday to me. I don't like getting gifts. I don't like being awarded. I don't like having attention drawn to me whatsoever, not one little bit. I go out of my way to make myself unknown. Yet, at the same time, I'm an artist and a writer, and a part of me craves the idea of existing and being recognized long after I am gone. And what's worse is that death will, instead of finally being the ultimate relaxation for me, the release from the ever lingering worsening state of my mental health and grief, very likely make everyone pay attention to me. The thing I want the most will also come with the thing I want the least, and there's some sick sort of irony for you there.
People I went out of my way not to talk to will talk about me, they will do things for me because it is socially expected of them to do so, or in some cases, legally expected of them to do so, and for a moment, albeit a brief moment, I will have all the attention in the world. At least I won't be around to witness it. Unless being a ghost is real, in which case then I will be around to witness it and this whole ordeal of circular ironic misery will be never ending, but we'll see when we get there I suppose. Some people want to be remembered. They want to be thought about every single day. Me? I'm alright with a glance towards the mantel every now and then. I don't want all that attention anyway, and I get it, you're busy.
You've got a life to live.
Please don't waste it thinking about me.
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