La Belle Mort
Since the only kind of poker you know is strip or losing, I’ll give myself a handicap
Books and Authors Mentioned
- Beyond Weird by Philip Ball - Search Google
- Sadly, Porn by Edward Teach - Search Google
- Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty - Search Google
- This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib by Quan Millz - Search Google
“Patricia, can you please go locate the other grandmother.” “Ok, sir…” Patrice quickly exited the room to go locate Mrs. Watkins.
--This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib - Quan Millz
One of my favorite things about this book is the inconsistences in names of characters. This one is literally one sentence apart 😭
12:15 PM. Another day, another dollar for Ms. McGill and her bubbly DCFS case manager social worker colleagues. Among the smacking of rib tips and strawberry sodas procured from I-57 BBQ restaurant, the women were huddled in their area of the office floor, talking, joking and gossiping about the usual topics. As usual Ms. McGill’s sex life became the eventual subject of the lunch conversation. “Girl, yesss! Bitch, let me tell you what James did. He took some of that good ass Wing Stop ranch and dripped all down my coochie. Nigga slopped it all up,” Shirley laughed as she wiped bbq sauce from around her greasy lips. “Bitch, you gon get a nasty yeast infection if you keep engaging in this freaky shit. Watch and see. Yo pussy gon be out of commission for a good two months!” Theresa joked.
--This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib - Quan Millz
“Ms. McGill – why didn’t you do the home visit?” “I got sick. Like I said, I had one of my girls down at Section 8 do it.” “But Ms. McGill, if you read the original report coming in from the hotline as well as the recent police report filed when the mother got into a fight with her two sons, you should’ve at least got someone else in our office to do a home visit. Now, this girl could be having a serious health issue because it seems like you didn’t care too much…” “Excuse me?” Ms. McGill’s voice became very audible, loud enough to make the women around her turn around in her seats and mind their business. “Let me talk to you for a second in the conference room,” Ms. McGill commanded. The two women made their way inside of the conference room a few feet away. Ms. McGill slammed the door. Instantly Ms. Gonzales became shaken. “Ms. McGill, all of that isn’t even necessary.” “Listen, let me tell you something. You are a rookie around here. I been doing this for thirty years. I’d be damned if you are gonna come in here and tell me how I am not doing my job. You gon respect me or else—” “Or else what? Ms. McGill. You violated protocol. You didn’t technically do the home visit. You are submitting potentially false information based on the testimony of someone not in our department, but from the city. How do we even know this case manager down at CHA even did a thorough inspection?” Suddenly Ms. McGill got up into the younger girl’s face. “You just don’t get it, do you?” Ms. Gonzales didn’t back down. “You think just because you some ole young white girl with a degree from the University of Chicago and shit, you can come in here and tell us black people what to do? I know my people. I know my community. Nothing happened to that girl according to the CHA caseworker. And I trust her advice. So, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna go back and finish my lunch. Just mind your own damn business and work on your assigned cases. Thank you for last night, but I don’t need any more of your assistance. Just drop it.” “Ms. McGill, I am going to have to go to the director about this. This isn’t right. You aren’t even showing the urgency to even drop what you are doing now to check up on the girl…. And for the record, I’m half black and grew up in Gary.” Ms. McGill couldn’t say anything to rebut Ms. Gonzales. Hearing that her “colleague” was not only half-Black but grew up in a predominantly black Gary, Indiana was a jab at her ignorance and there was just no way she could come back. She just pushed past the young Hispanic social worker and went back to her desk. Ms. Gonzales, however, wasn’t going to back down. She was going to take things into her hands now. By any means necessary. Even if it meant she had to clash with the veteran social worker. Ms. McGill thought her clout and power inside the office was going to shut Ms. Gonzales down, but that wasn’t the case. Right is right. Wrong is Wrong. DCFS wronged Myyah – otherwise possibly she wouldn’t be in the position she was now in. The young, mission-oriented social worker hurried back to her seat. She grabbed her belongings, laptop, issued cell phone and car keys. She once again made her way outside and made her way to her car. Off to Northwestern, she went in order to see about Myyah.
--This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib - Quan Millz
Deontae smacked his teeth and lowered his gaze. His body language emitted shame for what he was about to say. “Man, my baby moms Tina kicked me out. The apartment in her name and the landlord said I gotta go since my name ain’t on the lease. I ain’t got nowhere else to say ‘cuz my mama’nem crib already packed to the brim.” “Damn, none of your homeboys can’t even let you stay with them?” “Nah, I already asked. None of they bitches wanna let me stay and shit.” “And you ain’t got no cousins and what not you can stay with?” Deontae smacked his teeth once more, “Nah, sis.” “So…..” Fredquisha mumbled, tapping her foot against the floor, hands on her waist. “What you sayin’ is you wanna stay with me?” “I mean…I can’t think of anyone else. Besides, I mean, I figure since we cool and all, and we kick it from time to time and shit, you know, hey,” Deontae nervously grinned. Essentially what he was alluding to was the fact that since he’d already tagged the pussy several times, MooMoo shouldn’t really have any qualms letting him stay. “Boy, I got my kids livin’ with me and then I got this social worker lady supposed to be comin’ over my place at any moment now and shit. I don’t know, Deontae. Besides, I’m kinda seein’ someone right now…” She was lying about seeing someone. Trel had ghosted her ass.
--This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib - Quan Millz
Trel one of the only smart characters, got out early.
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. “Ughhh, this dude just doesn’t get it.” Katina felt her phone buzzing in her back pocket. She already had an inkling it was Deontae once again sending her a text message from a different phone. Since their little “encounter” earlier this week, it was obvious by the barrage of text messages he kept blasting her with that he wasn’t over it. He’d be damned if Katina was just going to up and leave. This wasn’t even just about the pussy. This was all about his control over her and his need for her to stabilize his lifestyle. Without her, everything around him would begin to crumble. Katina though, strong more than ever, simply ignored his “idle” threats. But the more he persisted, the more she grew concerned that Deontae was really going to make good on his threats. What that threat would look like? Well, Katina didn’t know. But she had something for his ass though… With their encounter coupled with the stream of threatening text messages, the first thing she was planning on doing was going down to the police station to file a temporary restraining order against him. Then she was going to go make sure her gun card was still up to date with the City of Chicago. She no longer trusted this fuck nigga since every day he was showing his true colors of desperation and insecurity. If he tried it with her on that level, she was ready to kill him if necessary. Katina whipped out her phone, glanced down and saw the message from the blocked number… “You betta get yo mind right before I do…” the text message read. The ICU nurse immediately deleted it and shook her head. She took a deep breath and rolled her eyes. “Girl, you alright? You looked stressed? Margaret, another nurse in the ICU asked once she sensed Katina looked a bit shook. “Yeah, I’m cool. Just dealing with a no good ass nigga,” she fake smiled and laughed. Deep down, she was a tad fearful but ready to defend herself at all cost if Deontae truly tried to put his hands on her or pull some other crazy shit. She had to. By any means necessary now was she going to defend herself and her kids. Crazy how niggas can quickly lose their cool even just after days of a breakup. Literally, days…It wasn’t even a full week since Katina left her apartment she shared with the sorry ass nigga.
--This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib - Quan Millz
You never know what you have until it's gone?
Though Mike now ran the crematory, Westwind Cremation & Burial was the house that Joe built. I had never met Joe (né Joaquín), the owner of Westwind: he retired just before I cremated my first body, leaving Mike in charge. He became somewhat of an apocryphal figure. Physically absent, perhaps, but still a specter in the building. Joe had an invisible pull over Mike, watching him work, making sure he stayed busy. Mike had the same effect on me. We both worried about the iron glare of our supervisors.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
The spectre of (my boss)
It would be a lie to say I hadn’t had a particular vision of being a crematory operator. I expected the job would involve placing a body in one of the giant machines and settling down with my feet up to eat strawberries and read a novel as the poor man or woman was cremated. At the end of the day I’d take the train home in thoughtful reverie, having come to some deeper understanding of death. After a few weeks at Westwind, any dreams I had of berry eating reveries were replaced by much more basic thoughts, such as: When is lunch? Will I ever be clean? You’re never really clean at the crematory. A thin layer of dust and soot settles over everything, courtesy of the ashes of dead humans and industrial machinery. It settles in places you think impossible for dust to reach, like the inner lining of your nostrils. By midday I looked like the Little Match Girl, selling wares on a nineteenth-century street corner. There is not much to enjoy in a layer of inorganic human bone dusted behind one’s ear or gathered underneath a fingernail, but the ash transported me to a world different from the one I knew outside the crematory.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Four thousand years ago, the Hindu Vedas described cremation as necessary for a trapped soul to be released from the impure dead body. The soul is freed the moment the skull cracks open, flying up to the world of the ancestors. It is a beautiful thought, but if you are not used to watching a human body burn, the scene can be borderline hellish. The first time I peeked in on a cremating body felt outrageously transgressive, even though it was required by Westwind’s protocol. No matter how many heavy-metal album covers you’ve seen, how many Hieronymus Bosch prints of the tortures of Hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi’s face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination. When the body goes into the retort, the first thing to burn is its cardboard box, or “alternative container” as it’s called on the funeral bill. The box immediately melts into flames, leaving the body defenseless against the inferno. Then the organic material burns away, and a complete change overtakes the body. Almost 80 percent of a human body is water, which evaporates with little trouble. The flames then go to work on the soft tissues, charring the whole body a crispy black. Burning these parts, the ones that visually identify you, takes the bulk of the time.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
80% of my creamtion will be spent on THIS DI-
With Mr. Martinez safely out of the reefer, it was time to open the cardboard box. This, I had discovered, was the best part of my job. I equate opening the boxes with the early ’90s stuffed toy for young girls, Puppy Surprise. The commercial for Puppy Surprise featured a group of five-to-seven-year-old girls crowded around a plush dog. They would shriek with delight as they opened her plushy stomach and discovered just how many stuffed baby puppies lived inside. Could be three, could be four, or even five! This was, of course, the “surprise.” Such was the case with dead bodies. Every time you opened the box you could find anything from a ninety-five-year-old woman who died peacefully under home hospice care to a thirty-year-old man they found in a dumpster behind a Home Depot after eight days of putrefaction. Each person was a new adventure.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Always look on the bright side
The machine was ready for its first body when the temperature inside the brick chamber of the retort reached 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Every morning Mike stacked several State of California disposition permits on my desk, telling me who was on deck for the day’s cremations. After selecting two permits, I had to locate my victims in the “reefer”—the walk-in body-refrigeration unit where the corpses waited. Through a cold blast of air I greeted the stacks of cardboard body boxes, each labeled with full names and dates of death. The reefer smelled like death on ice, an odor difficult to pinpoint but impossible to forget. The people in the reefer would probably not have hung out together in the living world. The elderly black man with a myocardial infarction, the middle-aged white mother with ovarian cancer, the young Hispanic man who had been shot just a few blocks from the crematory. Death had brought them all here for a kind of United Nations summit, a roundtable discussion on nonexistence.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Or you could just live in NYC, but your choice I guess.
Five roach goons crawled out of the radiator next to deeply sleeping Myyah. The roach clique was on a 3 AM hunt for some food they sensed some moments ago. They were amped, ready to hit a lick so they could come up in the muhfuckin’ vicious streets of pest city. One of them, the obvious leader of the gang, spotted an unknown stranger sleeping on his turf. She was a pretty, petite brown skin girl who from a million miles away smelled of spicy pepperoni grease. Triple OG Chief of the roach gang waved his antennas in the direction of Myyah, letting his crew know they spotted their unaware, young victim. The five roaches then scurried closer to Myyah. They crawled on her limbs and slowly made their way up her torso and chest. Myyah didn’t flinch at all. The roaches trekked closer and closer to her face. Once they landed on her neck, they scratched and sniffed at the pizza grease spots stained under her chin and upper neck. Myyah continued to sleep, unaware that the roaches were literally camping out on her face and upper body. Triple OG Chief roach grew angered. This young bitch didn’t have any food. He looked to his side and saw another one of his partners too was visibly upset. Four of the roaches looked at each other, giving themselves the “Fuck It” look. So, they took off, but Triple OG Chief roach was mad. This victim he assumed was holding something valuable and the lil hoe didn’t have anything on her. What a waste of time and energy. So, without hesitation Triple OG Chief roach bit into the girl’s left cheekbone. “AHHH! AHHHHHH!” Suddenly Myyah woke up and scratched hard at her face. Triple OG Chief roach scampered away and off into the room’s deep darkness to catch up with the rest of his team. Maybe they needed to go onto a larger excursion in the apartment and find the real source of the pizza grease – the box of leftovers still sitting on the coffee table in the living room. “NaNa! NaNa!” Myyah stormed out of the air mattress and lunged towards the side of the bed where Evelyn was sleeping on; her snores though amplified the entire room not allowing Myyah’s fearful pleas enter her ears. “Ahhhh! NaNa!” Myyah screamed again hoping by now her amplified cry would wake the grandmother up. Evelyn slowly opened her eyes and choked a bit on her tongue. NaNa had severe sleep apnea and truth be told should’ve been sleeping with her CPAP mask on her face. “What, girl?” Evelyn lowly growled, somewhat annoyed baby girl had awakened her out of her deep, dreamy sleep. “A roach bit me on my face!” Myyah cried as she fervently wiped her cheekbone. She could feel slight stinging irritation spread across her face. Evelyn smacked her teeth. “Girl, you just probably had a nightmare. Ain’t no damn roaches gon bite you on your face.” NaNa yawned and wiped slobber from the corners of her mouth. Her mouth a bit parched from the snoring and the two cigs she smoked after she got done eating her pizza and ice cream with baby girl. Myyah knew for sure though that wasn’t a nightmare. The roach bite was definitely a reality, and as she continued to scratch her face, tears welled in her eyes. Evelyn huffed and yawned again. “Come on and get in the bed with me. I knew I should’ve never had you sleep by yourself anyways…” NaNa pulled back the blanket showering her plump body and invited the girl to sleep next to her. Myyah had all-out reluctance and fear racing through her body. Baby girl stood there for a moment or two before she gave in and crawled into the bed and snuggled herself next to Evelyn. However, she kept scratching her face hoping the stinging would subside. As a few minutes passed and surely the pain dithered away. Myyah closed her eyes once more and fell asleep.
--This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib - Quan Millz
A tragic turn!!
“We’re here,” Officer Jiminewski said. “Great…Myyah, this is your other grandmother’s place. You have to temporarily stay here for a while, ok?” “How long I gotta stay here?” Myyah inquired. “It might be a for a few days. Maybe even a little bit longer. But it shouldn’t be that long?” “Well, why can’t I just stay with my other grandma? This grandma don’t like me…” “What makes you say that?” “’Cuz she just don’t like me. She treat me differently than the other kids.” “Ok, well, you won’t have to stay here that much longer. We are gonna see what problems are going on and if it turns out that your mother or grandmother can’t keep you, there is a good chance you will go back to your other grandmother, ok?” “Are you lying to me?” Ms. Gonzales was caught by surprise by the stern, terse question coming from the six-year-old. “No, I am not lying. I am telling you the truth. Don’t worry, ok?” Myyah didn’t respond. Ms. Gonzales glanced over at the unfazed officer. He didn’t care quite honestly. This was the end of his shift and he just wanted to make it back to his condo on the Northwest Side in time to crack a few beers and catch this Chicago White Sox documentary that was coming on ESPN at 10. “Ready?” he asked Ms. Gonzales. “Yeah,” the social worker exhaled.
--This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib - Quan Millz
"To protect (my time off) and to serve (chips and beer)"
As a personal aside, whenever anyone says the phrase “alpha males” as if it were actionable intel I have to silently talk myself out of committing a felony. But in this movie race and class divisions no longer exist, so it seems the only labels the writers could come up with are alpha and beta. They even have the alpha males refer to themselves as alpha males. They’re not. You can’t be an alpha male if you have to tell me you’re an alpha male, I have no problem calling you one if you insist, but don’t expect me to instinctively react to you as if you are. The ΛAX brothers aren’t alpha males. And the TriDelts aren’t alpha females. They’re extroverts. I know a lot of alphas and betas want those to be the same thing, but boy oh boy are they not.
--Sadly, Porn - Edward Teach
This is so true, extraversion is disgustingly OP. Because of the way communication works, any words (even dumb ones) clog the audial space. Competition is a right to be heard.
The 2020 straight-to-video-clips sex comedy Confirmative Assent (title graphic: “ConFIRMative ASSent”) cold opens with the tailgate majors of Delta Delta Delta (per the boys: “Try Delta, because two out of three go down!”) and the lacrosse majors of Lambda Alpha Chi (per the girls: “ΛΑΧ: “So dumb they need a helmet!”) at a fraternity party, where the game of the night is Four Second Rule (“if you want a safeword, GTFO”). Banality aside, from an expository standpoint you could do far worse than Four Second Rule for introducing characters, you can do set up, joke, and sexual punchline fast enough to keep the audience’s attention yet efficiently reveal a lot about each characters’ wants, motivations, and relationships without slogging through contrived backstory; i.e., their backstory doesn’t need to be explicitly revealed because it manifests in their behavior.
--Sadly, Porn - Edward Teach
The Case Of The Mistaken Identity A couple wants to put some excitement into their relationship. Their plan is to go out separately to a bar, he'll pretend to be a stranger and try to pick her up. He shows up and spots his wife sitting at the bar looking like a million bucks. He cocks his head, saunters over like he has every right to be there and starts smoothly hitting on her. A couple of drinks and a “whaddya say we get out of here” later, he takes her home and they have sex like porn stars. The next morning she wakes up luxurious and glowing. He, however, is enraged. “If I had known how much of an easy slut you were, I never would have married you!”
--Sadly, Porn - Edward Teach
Boys want to get laid, but marry a virgin
What does it mean to be pathologically monogamous? It is hiding in plain sight. By loving only one person at a time, you inoculate yourself from dependency on everyone else except that person. Then you put a block between you and your “love”, so that you cannot become dependent on them either; and if they become 100% dependent on you, well, you win and you can cash out.
--Sadly, Porn - Edward Teach
Good word choice of "pathological" here
Since the only kind of poker you know is strip or losing, I’ll give myself a handicap
--Sadly, Porn - Edward Teach
REKT
Let’s take care: ‘reality’ is bandied about too recklessly. In everyday usage it’s an inherently macroscopic concept: we can only view it through the lens of what we experience. In this sense, we have absolutely no reason to expect that it is ‘reality all the way down’. Still, almost all of science works fine by assuming that our perception of reality can be related to an underlying physical, tangible substrate that doesn’t innately depend on that perception. We can account for the properties of stuff we touch, taste, smell and so forth by appealing to the concepts of atoms and molecules, and then more finely to protons and electrons and so on interacting by quantum rules. We have learnt to expect that we can explain experience through logical reasoning applied to what we can measure in ever more refined detail. Quantum mechanics shows the limits of that approach: the places where our conventional, intuitive logic ultimately fails. It doesn’t even have to be a microscopic limit, but just any place where quantum rules don’t generate some classical approximation. In that regime, says Omnès, we can’t any longer talk about a ‘reality’. For him, reality must be a space in which facts are unique: in which, you might say, there are events. The rest is beyond our powers of reason. We simply can’t bridge the gap, or at least not with quantum theory alone. As Berthold-Georg Englert puts it, the theory can’t help us when we ask the question ‘Why are there events?’ All it can do is to show us that, to our surprise, this is a valid and puzzling question at all.
--Beyond Weird - Philip Ball
It's honestly surreal that reality allows for people to pecieve a version of it, while being impossible to fully describe. It's like living on the Earth without ever seeing the full thing.
‘Fact’ was originally a legal term, etymologically derived from the Latin word for an action: it was a ‘thing that was done’, not some pre-existing truth. That might remain a useful distinction for quantum mechanics; certainly it seems to be what Niels Bohr had in mind in yoking facts to experiments. If I observe that something happened, and I can show that my observation is reliable, then surely it must be considered a fact? And if it’s a fact, then by definition it must be true, right?
--Beyond Weird - Philip Ball
Theres some whores in this house
Go to any meeting about the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, Chris Fuchs wrote in 2002, ‘and it is like being in a holy city in great tumult. You will find all the religions with all their priests pitted in holy war.’ Things have not changed a great deal since then. The problem, Fuchs said, is that all of the priests have the same starting point: the standard textbook accounts of the axioms of quantum theory. Like holy scripture, these documents are ambiguous and obscure. There are several ways to express such axioms, but they tend to go something like this: 1. For every system, there is a complex Hilbert space H. 2. States of the systems correspond to projection operators onto H. 3. Those things that are observable somehow correspond to the eigenprojectors of Hermitian operators. 4. Isolated systems evolve according to the Schrödinger equation. Even at this late stage in the book I don’t expect these axioms to make a great deal of sense to you (although some of the jargon might now seem a little familiar). There are words here I haven’t explained, and which I am not going to explain. That’s the point: why should we need such obscure terminology in the first place? Where, in this dry linguistic thicket, is the real world?
--Beyond Weird - Philip Ball
They need "The Young Pope" for Quantum physicists
In general, communications are very inefficient because they involve exchanging lots of information that doesn’t feature in the final answer. This seems to be a fundamental problem for classical information, which is necessarily local: it’s fixed in one place. Suppose, say, you and I want to arrange a meeting. We’re both very busy, but we compare diaries by phone. We might hit on a suitable date by randomly asking ‘Are you free on 6 June?’ and so on. But that could take some time if our diaries are very full. To compile a complete list of the days on which we can meet, we have to exchange information about our availability on every single day of the year. Suppose we look instead for an answer to what sounds like a simpler question: whether the number of possible days we’re both free to meet is even or odd. Admittedly that seems a strange thing to ask, since it doesn’t exactly help with the original problem of finding a date to meet. But it looks like it should be a simpler thing to decide, because the answer is just one bit of information: say, 0 for ‘even’, 1 for ‘odd’. All the same, we’re no better off. The only way we can deduce the value of this single bit is for me again to list every day in the year that I’m free, and you to compare against your calendar. We have to send all those dates just to get a one-bit answer. In fact, any problem of comparing data that is recorded classically (written down in a diary, say) can be shown to be equivalent to – and thus as inefficient as – this one. If we can somehow quantum-entangle our diaries, we don’t have to exchange so much information to find the answer to our question: non-locality can reduce some of this redundancy of information sharing. But not all of it.
--Beyond Weird - Philip Ball
Are the features of books localized to the page? What about copy paste? What about this blog?
Sometimes I think of how my childhood would have been different if I had been introduced directly to death. Made to sit in his presence, shake his hand. Told that he would be an intimate companion, influencing my every move and decision, whispering, “You are food for worms” in my ear. Maybe he would have been a friend. So, really, what was a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematory like Westwind? The truth was, I saw the job as a way to fix what had happened to the eight-year- old me. The girl kept up at night by fear, crouched under the covers, believing if death couldn’t see her, then he couldn’t take her. Not only could I heal myself, but I could develop ways to engage children with mortality from early on so that they didn’t end up as traumatized as I was by their first experience with death. The plan was simple. Picture this: an elegant house of bereavement—sleek and modern, but with an Old World charm. It was going to be called La Belle Mort. “Beautiful death,” in French. At least, I was fairly sure it meant beautiful death. I needed to double-check before opening my future funeral home, so I wasn’t like those girls who think they’re getting the Chinese character for “hope” tattooed on their hip when in fact it is the Chinese character for “gas station.” La Belle Mort would be a place where families could come to mourn their dead in exciting new ways and put the “fun” back into “funeral.” Perhaps, I reasoned, our pathological fear of death comes from treating it as so much gloom and doom. The solution was to do away with all the nonsense of the “traditional” funeral. Out the door with you, expensive caskets, tacky flower wreaths, and embalmed corpses in suits. Sayonara, canned eulogies featuring “Lo as you walk through the valley of sad stuff,” and stacks of greeting cards with sunsets and saccharine platitudes like “She’s in a better place.” Our traditions had held us back for far too long. It was time to get out from underneath the cloud of death denial and into celebration mode. There would be parties and merriment at La Belle Mort. It would usher in the new age of the twenty-first-century spectacle funeral. Dad’s cremated ashes could be sent into space, or tamped into bullets and shot out of a gun, or turned into a wearable diamond. I would likely end up catering to celebrity types; Kanye West was sure to want a laser hologram of himself next to twelve-foot-high Champagne fountains at his memorial service. Back in the crematory at Westwind, as I waited for a pair of decedents to burn, I made lists of what I was going to offer at La Belle Mort Funeral Home: ashes turned into paintings, crushed into tattoo ink, made into pencils or hourglasses, shot out of a glitter cannon. My Belle Mort notebook had a simple black cover, but the front page was covered in pastel stickers of giant-eyed animals like something from a Margaret Keane painting. I thought it made the contents more upbeat, but in retrospect it probably increased the creepy factor tenfold.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Bury me inside a Gucci Store
I didn’t even know whether she was alive or dead, and I was far too terrified to ask. Very quickly it ceased to matter to me. Oprah could have brought me on her show and, her hands waving wildly, announced, “Caitlin, you don’t know it, but that girl is ALIIIIIVE and here she IIIIIS” and it wouldn’t have changed the fear that had already infected me. I had started seeing death everywhere. It lived at the very edge of my peripheral vision—a fuzzy, cloaked figure that disappeared when I turned to face him head-on. There was a student in my class, Bryce Hashimoto, who had leukemia. I didn’t know what leukemia was, but a fellow classmate told me it made you throw up and die. As soon as he described the disease, I knew, at once, that it afflicted me as well. I could feel it eating me from the inside out. Fearing death, I wanted to reclaim control over it. I figured it had to play favorites; I just needed to make sure I was one of those favorites. To limit my anxiety I developed a whole bouquet of obsessive compulsive behaviors and rituals. My parents could die at any moment. I could die at any moment. It was my job to do everything right—counting, tapping, touching, checking—to retain balance in the universe and avoid further death. The rules of the game were arbitrary but did not feel irrational. Walk the perimeter of my house three times in a row before feeding my dog. Step over fresh leaves; plant feet directly on dead leaves instead. Check five times to make sure the door had locked. Jump into bed from three feet away. Hold your breath when passing the mall so small children don’t go plummeting off the balcony. My elementary school principal called my parents in for a chat. “Mr. and Mrs. Doughty, your daughter has been spitting into the front of her shirt. It’s a distraction.” For months I had been ducking my mouth down into my shirt and releasing my saliva into the fabric, letting the wet stain slowly spread downward like a second collar. The reasons for this were obscure. Somehow I had decided that failing to drool down my shirt sent a direct message to the governing powers of the universe that I didn’t want my life badly enough, and that they were free to throw me to the wolves of death. There is a treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder called cognitive-behavioral therapy. By exposing the patient to her worst fears, she can see that the disastrous outcome she expects will not occur, even if she doesn’t perform her rituals. But my parents had grown up in a world where therapy was for the insane and the disturbed, not their cherished eight-year-old child (who just happened to spit into her shirt collar and obsessively tap her fingers on the kitchen counter).
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
I personally resonate with this. ARFID.
Punalei Place is the small cul-de-sac in Kaneohe, Hawai’i, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. My house was average at best, but due to its location on a tropical island it had the good fortune of being flanked on one side by an epic mountain range and on the other by a sparkling blue bay. You had to sprint up the front walkway during coconut season lest an overripe coconut hurl itself down onto your head.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
“The Cremulator” sounds like a cartoon villain or the name of a monster truck but is in fact the name of what is essentially a bone blender, roughly the size of a kitchen crockpot. I swept the bone fragments from the tray into the Cremulator and set the dial to twenty seconds. With a loud whir, the bone fragments were crushed into the uniform powdery puree that the industry calls cremated remains. In California, it is assumed (and is, in fact, the law) that Mr. Martinez’s family would receive fluffy white ashes in their urn, not chunks of bone. Bones would be a harsh reminder that Mr. Martinez’s urn contained not just an abstract concept but an actual former human. Not every culture prefers to avoid the bones. In the first century CE, the Romans built tall cremation pyres from pine logs. The uncoffined corpse was laid atop the pyre and set ablaze. After the cremation ended, the mourners collected the bones, hand-washed them in milk, and placed them in urns. Lest you think bone washing hails only from the ancient bacchanalian past, bones also play a role in the death rituals of contemporary Japan. During kotsuage (“the gathering of the bones”) the mourners gather around the cremation machine when the bones are pulled out of the chamber. The bones are laid on a table and the family members come forward with long chopsticks to pick them up and transfer them into the urn. The family first plucks the bones of the feet, working their way up toward the head, so that the deceased person can walk into eternity upright.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
In a way this is poetic. We are born in a blender of DNA and turned to ash in a blender of bones.
When Mr. Martinez had been reduced to red glowing embers—red is important, as black means “uncooked”—I turned the machine off, waited until the temperature crept down to 500 degrees, and swept out the chamber. The rake at the end of the metal pole removes the larger chunks of bones, but a good cremationist uses a fine-toothed metal broom for hard-to-reach ashes. If you’re in the right frame of mind, the bone sweeping can reach a rhythmic Zen, much like the Buddhist monks who rake sand gardens. Sweep and glide, sweep and glide.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
