Random

1) Bin Laden dead. Weird they'd bury the body at sea. Commence the conspiracy theories!

2) Ours is not a culture of death. Ours is a culture of killing. There's a difference in focus. Big difference. Let's compare. The Greeks and others drew out the afterlife: they had their personages, their geographies. Gilgamesh, one fo the earliest epic heroes, preoccupied himself with attaining immortality. New Testament made a big deal about the Kingdom of Heaven. Dante went insane with his vision of death. Hamlet thought of death at least half the time. Here we focus on the experience of dying. How does one prepare oneself for the great beyond? How can we ensure we're leaving something meaningful behind? When they spoke of death, they spoke about what would be a personal experience.

In America, death is a joke until you're dying. Speak more than a sentence on The End, you'll probably make no friends. You'll be secretly ridiculed as a big emo baby. (What does that say about me?) The quality of life too good. The infant mortality rate is too low. Our people are too fat. (Heart disease acts too slow to be fearful.) So, no, that subject is not the subject. When they danced at Ground Zero, they celebrated the kill, the retribution. They danced in honor of the hole in the head. It was the act, the power that one can take away any thing from an enemy. What does his soul matter? Perhaps we could imagine him in his bubbling afterlife, but the focus is on the body. One man wrote on some comment board, "We should hang his body from the statue of liberty." Or something to that effect. We take it out on what we can see. Or what we can deform. We cannot deform a soul. We can deform the flesh. And there is something gratifying about that.

Well, this post disturbed me.

(But, seriously, fuck Bin Laden.)