An Amateur’s Guide to Death

by admin_erikheen | Feb 14, 2021 | Uncategorised

An Amateur’s Guide to Death

As I sat alone in the Brass Rail Pub, Ralph Stanley’s eerie death anthem taunted me from barroom speakers:

Well what is this, that I can’t see? With ice-cold hands taking hold of me

And they call this happy hour?

I’ll fix your feet ’til you can’t walk, I’ll lock your jaw ’til you can’t talk

These lyrics are chilling enough, but even more so the day a fellow human being nearly plugged a hole in my skull with a .45 caliber pistol.

While working for a rather seedy property management outfit, I’d had the unenviable task of evicting a drug addicted renter from his apartment. Not too thrilled with the news, he introduced me to his pistol and waved it in the general vicinity of my face. Did I sneer back with a defiant Clint Eastwood scowl? Nope. Did I attempt a John Wayne-like grab to wrestle his gun from him? Hardly. This wasn’t the movies, so, although I consider myself a rather brave individual, I fled like a chased rabbit, nearly pissing my proverbial pants as I zigzagged away to dodge the bullet that, thank God, never came.

And now Ralph Stanley was rubbing it in with his infamous death lyrics.

I’m Death, I come to take the soul, leave the body and leave it cold

My life-threatening encounter naturally triggered some thoughts of death’s consequences—thoughts ordinarily bottled up in the darkest recesses of my brain.

Had that loser actually plugged me, no doubt my loved ones would pour forth the usual consolations to justify my departure. Euphemisms ranging from the sacred,: “Erik is with the angels now,” to the rustic,: “He’s riding off into the sunset,” to the downright irreverent,: “Erik’s pushing up the daisies.” And they’d say things they never dreamt of saying while I was alive: “We’re lucky he was a part of our lives,” “He was a good example for others,” and the inevitable “Erik was loved by all.” Loved by all? I’ve scarcely been loved by half a dozen. Despite the delicate ways we try to wrap the package, death is still pretty much dead.

My head is warm, my feet are cold. Death is a’ movin’ upon my soul.

And see there? Nothing is more romanticized than death. Even as a child, I saw it less as a tragedy than a noble adventure. Indeed, in our games of cops and robbers, I became famous for my theatrical death performances. I’d clutch my chest, gaze at the heavens, and stagger for a full minute before collapsing to the dirt. After writhing with a woeful moan, I’d gasp my dramatic last words. “Get those dirty rats who shot me in the back.” Yes, death was a lot more fun back when it was a game.

For its part, Hollywood has done more than their fair share to camouflage death’s impact. A quick Google indicates they bombard us with 20,000 deaths (most of them murders) before we’re even through puberty. Daily scenes of people plunging from buildings and getting stabbed and shot can eventually lull thoughts of death into a rather ho-hum occurrence. And I’ve noticed movie deaths are never arbitrary. Good guys invariably die as a result of heroic gestures, and bad guys die at the hands of justice. Nobody spoils the plot by getting knocked off for $350 worth of back rent like I almost had.

To drop the flesh off of the frame. The Earth and worms both have a claim

Geezus, Ralph, spare us the graphic details. But that does beg the question of what will become of my mortal remains when I go. I’ve already signed on to that organ donor registry. Although I’m far from the sentimental type, I like to think my whiskey-soaked organs could provide a little boost for one of my fellow humans. Of course, if I had a say in who gets my spare parts, I’d bequeath them to world-renowned artists and scientists. I’d hate to see my liver draining the bile of a two-bit criminal, my pancreas secreting fluids through an evil dictator’s lymphatic system, or, God forbid, my heart pumping blood through the snooty veins of a Yankees fan. Nevertheless, regardless of the recipient, I guess a little of me living on is a consoling thought.

But while my spare parts are winning Nobel Prizes, the less useful bits need to be dealt with. I pondered getting a unique final send-off. The writer Hunter S. Thompson had his remains shot from a cannon. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s mummified head is displayed in University College London. And baseball great Ted Williams presently hangs upside down as a human popsicle in a cryogenic lab. Never the flamboyant type, however, I think I’ll choose a less exotic route in my voyage toward physical absorption: char-broiled into a tidy pile of carbon residue.

Indeed, nothing against your song Ralph, but because I’ve decided to bypass that messy, rotting away stage, worms won’t be crawling anywhere near my flesh. True, fresh corpses in funeral chambers can look downright attractive—I’ve even seen people kiss them—and after a couple of centuries, dust merging with the earth has a noble sense of eternity. It’s that unsavory, decomposing phase in between I find rather unappealing. Therefore, I’ll be taking my journey to infinity via the incinerator, going from kissable to urn-able in one fell swoop.

Well I am Death, none can excel. I’ll open the door to Heaven or Hell

You’re right, Ralph. No discussion of death could be complete without contemplating the afterlife. Like most people, I have envisioned myself someday sitting on a cloud playing the harp with Elvis. Conversely, after uttering an inadvertent “goddamn” or deducting my cat Fluffy off my taxes as a pest-control device, I find it hard not to envision that toasty alternative. And there’s that third possibility of reincarnation, transforming into anything from the King of Arabia to a Gila monster. But rather than agonizing over any of these post-mortem enigmas, I’ve decided to go along with the old folk song and ‘let the mystery be.’

Facing death also prompts a guy to contemplate his legacy—or lack thereof. No doubt my image will never grace a statue in the town square, and you won’t be reading about my dubious life in any history books. I think the long-suffering Russians got it right. They say, “Unless you’re the Czar, you’ll be forgotten after three generations.” For anyone not believing the truth in that, I kindly ask them to tell me all about their great-great-great grandparents.

I can envision one of my own descendants in the year 2200 cleaning out their attic. After dusting off my ancient portrait, they’ll glance at my forgotten image, shrug, and toss me into a box with the other unwanted knick-knacks.

My mother came to my bed. Placed a cold towel upon my head

Such depressing thoughts notwithstanding, that day’s encounter with that gun-wielding miscreant did spark some useful philosophical reflections. For billions of years, we didn’t exist, and for billions more, we won’t either. This micro-speck in between is all we got, and it ain’t a whole lot. You can spend your allotted time moping about life’s injustices, groveling before masters, and sitting on your arse watching reality TV. Or you can stare down the bullies, tackle the world’s injustices head-on, and claw through life with every last ounce of grit in your guts. Don’t be the world’s bitch. Make it yours.

Won’t you spare me over ’til another year?

Yes, Ralph, that day death indeed spared me over ’til another year.

As the singer’s chilling requiem wanes, I reviewed the flood of deliberations kindled by my near-demise: my survivors will turn my death into a cheesy social event; before long the world will forget I ever existed; chances are instead of a noble and meaningful death, I’ll wither away like a shriveled up tomato plugged into a blip-blip machine; and my ultimate fate will be as a handful of dust particles.

By the song’s end, I was weary of dwelling on this grim subject, so I threw back a shot of Wild Turkey and shook my head. If you really want to live life, there’s only one way to think about death: Don’t.

Ugly Little Brown Things

by admin_erikheen | Feb 14, 2021 | Uncategorised

While visiting the Benjamin Franklin monument in Philadelphia, I experienced an epiphany about pennies, of all things. Although Franklin invented the first American penny and spawned the phrase “A penny saved is a penny earned,” tourists ironically toss these lowly coins onto his monument’s grounds. These relics littering this sacred area epitomize the one-cent piece’s evolution from a worthy component of American life to a readily dispensable nuisance. Seeing them so casually discarded prompted me to ponder the unthinkable: maybe it’s time to abolish the American penny.

Granted, economics aside, it could be argued pennies represent an integral part of American culture—penny candy, penny loafers, lucky pennies, etc. The penny’s sanctity is also bolstered by the image of Abraham Lincoln gracing its surface. With Honest Abe instead of, say, Pee Wee Herman, adorning the penny, thoughts of retiring the one-cent piece become downright un-American.

But lest we become too sentimental, let’s look beyond the cultural quirks and weigh the penny’s practical value. How does it feel when they rattle around in your vacuum nozzle for five seconds before falling back to the floor? Or when you reach into your pocket for a quarter and pull out only pennies? How much time do these pests add to your wait in a checkout line when the cashier fumbles to make exact change for the customer in front of you? Only if you’re in the process of buying something that costs, say, $2.51, is a penny worth anything. You give the cashier a penny so you won’t get back any pennies. There’s your irony: the only way to avoid carrying pennies is to carry pennies. Not a good argument for keeping these ugly little brown things in our lives.

It wasn’t always like this. Before inflation whittled these once-valued coins into irrelevance, pennies bought something. They could buy a stick of gum, ten baseball cards, or a giant jawbreaker. You could even drop them into parking meters or newspaper machines. But what can you buy for a penny now? Anything? There’s got to be something, but what?

To ascertain this, I conducted an experiment. I visited a convenience store and asked the clerk if he carried anything that cost one cent. He grunted, shook his head, and examined me with an expression somewhere between suspicion and sympathy. With his unnerving gaze compelling me to buy something—anything—I purchased a key chain I didn’t need and slinked out of his store, once again cursing the penny’s existence.

In a more conventional experiment to gauge the penny’s value, I approached my seven-year-old daughter Clara while she was doing her homework. I held up a shiny new penny and said, “Here’s a penny, Clara! Just for you!” Years ago, if you offered a seven-year-old girl a penny she would smile, snatch it from your hand, and hop around with glee. Did Clara hop around with glee? Hardly. She glared at me and said, “Are you drunk?”

To further measure the worth of this lowly coin, I conducted a third experiment. In a city square during my lunch hour, I placed ten pennies on the sidewalk, sat on a bench twenty feet away, and observed the unfolding drama. Passersby occasionally glanced down, but no one bothered to grab any pennies. After twenty minutes, I tried to fuel more interest by positioning a quarter among the pennies. Notably, for the next half hour, nobody even picked up the quarter. This begs the question: what’s a penny worth if no one bothers to pick up something twenty-five times more valuable?

With these experiments bolstering my hypothesis, I went on to consider unconventional uses for pennies. For example, thanks to copper’s electrical conduction properties, pennies once served as temporary connections for screw-in house fuses. We no longer have those screw-in fuses, however, so I pondered other practical roles. Try as I may, I could think of only two: flipping for heads or tails and tossing into wishing wells. But even in these endeavors, any coin could perform the same function.

Growing increasingly immersed, I delved further into my appraisal of the penny’s worth—or lack thereof. I Googled the subject to determine how much it costs the U.S. Mint to manufacture pennies. The conclusion? According to the U.S. Mint’s own website, a penny costs about 1.7 cents to create. In other words, by manufacturing something nobody wants, we’re contributing to our national debt. A dubious fiscal policy at best.

Reading further, I discovered the U.S. government mints forty-one pennies each year for every man, woman, and child in America. Because the average lifespan of a penny is twenty-five years, we are each allotted 1,025 pennies at any given time. After exploring my surroundings, however, I unearthed only nine—most of them embedded in my sofa. Hence, if over a thousand pennies supposedly occupy my general vicinity, it’s hard to validate such a lofty allocation when I have at my immediate disposal less than one percent  of them.

Sliding further down the Google search results, I encountered opposition to my crusade in the form of an organization called Americans for Common Cents. Oddly enough, this curious alliance’s sole objective is to argue against the discontinuation of pennies. They claim the upper ground for the penny’s preservation, insisting 70% of Americans oppose abandoning the coin. Given the American propensity for convenience, however, I suspect few of this 70% would shed genuine tears should their lives become penny-free.

Let’s review our findings: you can’t buy anything for a penny, they rattle around in your vacuum, children don’t even want them, nobody bothers to pick them up, and it costs more to make them than they’re worth.

As I surveyed the pennies littering the monument’s grounds, an eerie feeling engulfed me— as if Ben Franklin’s spirit had emerged to challenge my reasoning. His ghostly entreaties sparked memories of bringing five pennies to the candy store for gum, collecting enough of them to make a roll, and emptying my piggy bank to search for pre-war coins.

Nevertheless, I whispered back: “Let it slide, Ben.” Far be it for me to question this genius, but abandoning our pennies would, paradoxically, resurrect his invention’s dwindling worth. As the years pass and we encounter fewer of them, we would increasingly treasure these relics—and what could be more patriotic?

The day may indeed come when the only pennies encountered will be the ones unearthed by future archaeologists, but when that day arrives, this beloved slice of copper-plated zinc will be the least of mankind’s worries. Until then, an enshrined penny would no longer be in the game, but like retiring an iconic athlete’s number, we could propel its legacy to its worthy distinction.