The writings of Oddpoet

Dead peo­ple are a real bum­mer, espe­cially when the fuck­ers owes you money. I remem­ber Richie had the gall to up and die whilst owing me $100.00, the fucker. Being freshly dead he was not yet pack­aged; so I make a bee line over to his crib­bage to check the thing out, you know to see if he was try­ing to get out of his debt. You’d be amazed the lengths peo­ple will go to get out of pay­ing me.

So I bust in and there is the perquisite mourn­ers cir­cle and there was Ritchie who was no longer Richie. And my $100.00 was no longer my $100.00 so I take a shot and start rifling through Richie’s pock­ets. Too late Aunt Sophie beat me too it. The bitch was a big­ger thief than Ritchie. The circle’s eyes widen in hor­ror as I start punch­ing Ritchie’s corpse and then they start scream­ing, all except Aunt Sophie, the bitch. I turned to them all pissed off and say: “What am I doing… hurt­ing his feel­ings? The fuck­ers dead!”

So I book and start think­ing about death.
I’m like every­one else; I don’t want to think about it. Death is like the fart in Church, no one wants to admit it’s there but we all can smell it.

The prob­lem with death is it reminds us that we will all even­tu­ally be strapped to that one man seat. Death is the ulti­mate one man show, no sup­port­ing acts, strictly solo. We are so frigged about death we want to get rid of the body as soon as possible:

“Get that frig­gin stiff outta here!”
“But Ward! It’s the Beaver.”
“I don’t give a shit June, tell Wally to drag it out to the garage and call those Under­taker creeps.’

Under­tak­ers– Nice name– I use to think Sur­geons were fucked up peo­ple but Under­tak­ers got them beat. Yea some­thing def­i­nitely creepy about a voca­tional choice involv­ing dead peo­ple. “How do you make a living?”

The first Under­tak­ers were fam­ily who washed and cleaned the stiff and pre­pared for the rit­ual mourn­ing of the dead. You had to make it quick, things can get smelly. The prob­lem was no one was sure if the per­son was really, really dead. I mean it looks dead, but…

That was the prob­lem, his­tory is replete with sto­ries of the dead com­ing back to life and a uni­ver­sal fear that is cross cul­tural is being buried alive. That will keep you up at night might even stop you from dying.

The first Under­tak­ers were Fred and Ernie. They vol­un­teered since they had no life and no one wanted the dead end job. The first order of busi­ness was to estab­lish was it dead? So the slap test was devel­oped.
“You want to take first shift Ernie?”
So Ernie starts slap­ping the shit out of the corpse.
“Seems dead”
Fred starts slap­ping the shit out of the corpse.
“Sucker is dead to me”
“We got to be sure this time can’t have a repeat of last Sat­ur­day”
“Old man Grady get­ting out of the cof­fin was not a good career fuzzy”
Luck­ily Aunt Martha had a heart attack so they could at least have a wake.”
“Yea, the keg was already tapped would have been a shame to waste it.”

That was the prob­lem and it was Fred who had the solu­tion.
“Eureka! Be right back!”
Fred gets a shop vac and evac­u­ates the corpse’s bod­ily flu­ids
Ernie’s eyes widen in amaze­ment.
Ernie’s riffs on Fred’s insight.
“We can put Uncle Bob’s spe­cial sauce in the stiff”
“What’s in it?”
“I think formalde­hyde, methanol, ethanol and a whole bunch of nasty.”

They did it! If the sucker wasn’t dead before it was now and the stiff keeps for at least a week. The mod­ern day Wake party was born. And we owe it all to Fred and Ernie.

Now leave me alone and stop mak­ing me think about this shit. I hate think­ing about death.

Think I’ll watch a hor­ror flick… Cool, George Romero’s “Night of the Liv­ing Dead” works for me…