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I like dead stuff.
11 years ago
How I Became Obsessed With Death -or- Why I Am Still A Smoker
A short story by Kellee
A lot of my friends and family have questioned my seemingly "morbid" affinity for everything Death. Although most of them see it as anything from a "quirk" to "perfectly normal", there are those that seem to feel it is an "unhealthy obsession". This short tale is for the latter.
I have always been fascinated ...with the dark and macabre. I remember the first scary story I was ever told: "The Monkey's Paw". I'm sure most of you are familiar with it, for those that aren't, look it up, I'm telling my own story.
I must have been about four or five when my mother was working as a nanny for a wealthy family with two daughters. One older than me, one younger. On our way to the park one day, the older girl begged my mom to tell us a scary story. I of course pleaded as well.
My mother seemed to be paging through her vast library of fear, searching for something appropriate for three young girls.
It was a late summer morning and the younger daughter and I were being pulled in a red wagon on a sidewalk lined with tall, well preened bushes. We were almost to the park when my mother finished her story. We were all silent. Something about that story sent shivers up my spine. That's when I asked my mother what "mutilated" meant. After she told me, that story became downright TERRIFYING. And I loved it.
Ten years later, I am in health class at our small, mountain town middle school. The "teacher" (P.E. teacher, after the counselor who usually taught the class was killed in a particularly gruesome car accident a few weeks prior) announces to us that she has a special guest for us today. A professor from a medical school in the city.
Hooray! We don't have to put condoms on bananas or label the female reproductive system today!
The professor caries in a fairly large black plastic trunk. (WHAT'S IN THE BOX!?)
He proceeds to tell the class that inside he has real human organs (mutilation, mutilation, mutilation). He offers that if anyone is uncomfortable with this, they may join the P.E. class already in progress (there were two P.E. teachers). I don't remember if anyone left. I'm transfixed on the box (mutilation, mutilation).
He turns the box away from us and opens it, reaches in. I must be leaning on my desk, hovering over my chair. What sort of horrors is he going to pull out of this case!?
"A human heart," the professor announces to the class, holding up a shiny, clean, colorful... piece of plastic?
No, he explains, it is freeze-dried and lacquered. My own heart sinks. Why was I expecting a bloody pile of slop?
This is bullshit.
"Would any of you like to hold it?" I jump out of my seat and practically run to the front of the class. Fuck yeah, I want to hold it!
The glossy heart is so perfect and light. The colors are brilliant (dyed, I'm sure). I feel how fragile it is and imagine crumbling it in my hands. The class passes it around, the boys trying to gross out the girls by shoving it in their faces or pretending to lick it. I wonder who the heart belonged to.
Next in his bag of tricks, a "set" of lungs. Not a pair, mind you, a healthy freeze dried and lacquered lung, and a smoker's freeze dried and lacquered lung.
"Can you see the difference? Do you see what smoking does to your body?"
Oh. Right. Health class.
I hold the lungs together. Of course I can see the aesthetic difference. A black lung, and a pink lung. But a "healthy" lung? The lungs are the same. They're both DEAD. The people who these belonged to no longer exist, smoker or otherwise. This hits me pretty hard. Not in a bad way, but it's a very sobering moment.
One day, I want to be that heart in the gross kid's mouth.
I want to be that cautionary tale of what chemicals will turn your insides to dust.
I want to be the mysterious skeleton in the corner of the science lab. I want people to make up stories about how I ended up in this place, or how I come to life at night and wander the halls.
But then I remember that it doesn't matter what becomes of me, because I will be dead, and I won't care.
A short story by Kellee
A lot of my friends and family have questioned my seemingly "morbid" affinity for everything Death. Although most of them see it as anything from a "quirk" to "perfectly normal", there are those that seem to feel it is an "unhealthy obsession". This short tale is for the latter.
I have always been fascinated ...with the dark and macabre. I remember the first scary story I was ever told: "The Monkey's Paw". I'm sure most of you are familiar with it, for those that aren't, look it up, I'm telling my own story.
I must have been about four or five when my mother was working as a nanny for a wealthy family with two daughters. One older than me, one younger. On our way to the park one day, the older girl begged my mom to tell us a scary story. I of course pleaded as well.
My mother seemed to be paging through her vast library of fear, searching for something appropriate for three young girls.
It was a late summer morning and the younger daughter and I were being pulled in a red wagon on a sidewalk lined with tall, well preened bushes. We were almost to the park when my mother finished her story. We were all silent. Something about that story sent shivers up my spine. That's when I asked my mother what "mutilated" meant. After she told me, that story became downright TERRIFYING. And I loved it.
Ten years later, I am in health class at our small, mountain town middle school. The "teacher" (P.E. teacher, after the counselor who usually taught the class was killed in a particularly gruesome car accident a few weeks prior) announces to us that she has a special guest for us today. A professor from a medical school in the city.
Hooray! We don't have to put condoms on bananas or label the female reproductive system today!
The professor caries in a fairly large black plastic trunk. (WHAT'S IN THE BOX!?)
He proceeds to tell the class that inside he has real human organs (mutilation, mutilation, mutilation). He offers that if anyone is uncomfortable with this, they may join the P.E. class already in progress (there were two P.E. teachers). I don't remember if anyone left. I'm transfixed on the box (mutilation, mutilation).
He turns the box away from us and opens it, reaches in. I must be leaning on my desk, hovering over my chair. What sort of horrors is he going to pull out of this case!?
"A human heart," the professor announces to the class, holding up a shiny, clean, colorful... piece of plastic?
No, he explains, it is freeze-dried and lacquered. My own heart sinks. Why was I expecting a bloody pile of slop?
This is bullshit.
"Would any of you like to hold it?" I jump out of my seat and practically run to the front of the class. Fuck yeah, I want to hold it!
The glossy heart is so perfect and light. The colors are brilliant (dyed, I'm sure). I feel how fragile it is and imagine crumbling it in my hands. The class passes it around, the boys trying to gross out the girls by shoving it in their faces or pretending to lick it. I wonder who the heart belonged to.
Next in his bag of tricks, a "set" of lungs. Not a pair, mind you, a healthy freeze dried and lacquered lung, and a smoker's freeze dried and lacquered lung.
"Can you see the difference? Do you see what smoking does to your body?"
Oh. Right. Health class.
I hold the lungs together. Of course I can see the aesthetic difference. A black lung, and a pink lung. But a "healthy" lung? The lungs are the same. They're both DEAD. The people who these belonged to no longer exist, smoker or otherwise. This hits me pretty hard. Not in a bad way, but it's a very sobering moment.
One day, I want to be that heart in the gross kid's mouth.
I want to be that cautionary tale of what chemicals will turn your insides to dust.
I want to be the mysterious skeleton in the corner of the science lab. I want people to make up stories about how I ended up in this place, or how I come to life at night and wander the halls.
But then I remember that it doesn't matter what becomes of me, because I will be dead, and I won't care.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOEfkWuU63Y
I actually already donated it to Science Care. They print out little cards with your name on them and everything! "In the event of my death, please contact science care."
I don't have any say it what they will do with it, though. I could be chopped up and sent all over the world for medical students to dissect, I could be a plastic surgery practice head, or a crash test dummy... I kinda want to do the Body Farm, but I heard there's a long waiting list for that one.
I still have really mixed feelings about the experience. I mean... that confrontation with mortality is kinda shocking, maybe a little too much too early in life - or I could go the other direction, it's useful to have the world demystified a little bit. And I've always been fascinated with how things work, why things work, the idea that you can stick your fingers in and take stuff apart to see those mechanisms, so as a kid this was incredibly compelling.
And yeah, I hate how high school/junior high school health classes work. Don't smoke, that's going to kill you. Don't drink, that's going to result in driving drunk and killing you. Don't drive, that'll probably kill you. Don't screw, that's going to kill you with disease (in the fundamentalist area where I grew up, there was exactly one mention of condoms, ever). Don't do illegal drugs, that'll reduce you to homelessness or insanity, then kill you. There's gotta be a better way of teaching kids that choices can have consequences other than worst-case scare stories.
It was at a job fair. They had you answer a bunch of questions on a computer and it would print out a list of careers that you might be interested in... "Artist" wasn't one of them. I only remember two of my results: Interior Decorator (wahoo) and Mortician. Go figure that that would be one of the answers on a children's job fair quiz.
For me, blood, gore and rotting flesh were something that became a normal, daily experience.
None of it was human of course, but I did discover that when I finally saw real human remains, it had little effect on me.
Just a different example of what I grew up with, really.
Your story is interesting though- It gives me a different perspective from what I grew up thinking of as "normal".
And realizing just how weird my life really was.
-Badger-
so its just part of the cycle. but i'm sorry i don't find it attractive in itself.
when i was little, if i missed the school bus, i had to walk along the road to get to school. and often along the way, there'd be some rotting corpse of something that had be struck by a car, all putred and crawling with little things turning it back into the earth.
not frightning, but disgusting. stomic turning. well that's what i think about dead things. this black foamy putred mess that what had been flesh progressively turning into, with the bones sticking out from among it. eventually the bugs and chemical process, you can watch it advance a little more each time you have to walk by, and the bad smell, but eventually the work of that process ends and the bugs sprout wings and fly away. and then there's just the colapsed bones and the little pile of dust that's the bug shit they leave behind.
well that's how i think of it because that's what i remember about it from when i was little.
neither of my parents got to have done what they would have prefered with their remains. i'll just let the state do what i feels like since i'm sure it will anyway. well having been in the military (though never anywhere near any sort of combat, nor did i ever wish to be) they'll probably stick me in the ground in some sort of military cemitary.
some of the earliest interesting architecture that was built to last was build to bury people in, where the sun wouldn't shine on them. i don't mean the pyramids with all their embalming and grave goods, but the passage graves the celts built.
i just, i don't see the body as having all that much to do with it. with who we are or anything about us. one life one body, some other life, some other kind of body. same us, even if memories don't travel well between lives and without brains and bodies.
the body is just there to carry the brain around and the brain is just there to carry the real self around so we can, with brain and body, touch and move and explore and create for a time physical things, until the body wears out and ceases to function. then we sleep or drift outside of time in nowhere until another infant is born on some other physical world. as different, one world from another, that nothing we learned in one life, would do us much good in another, even if we could remember it.
yet i do have something, if it cannot be memories, of other lives on other worlds before this one.
there were always lots of little furry wild creatures around where i was growing up, out in the woods, but they were always one or two, every month or so, getting run over by a car and laying along side the road to rot.
to me that was just sad.
when they eat each other that's different. there's blood all over the place. but that's a different kind of mess. that way something eats and gets something out of it. but when they get run over by a car or something, and their little mangled corpses just lie there to rot, that was just, i didn't usually throw up, but it often made me feel like i was going to.
sorry to go on about it, but we each see things in different ways.
so death to me, isn't like all that scary stuff in scary movies (and religions) and all that. it more like, those little rotting corpses by the side of the road, where something ran over them.
This also reminds me that, as a crafter, I've considered making a sword using a human femur as the pommel and grip. They're fairly easy to get, but a little on the pricey side; the bone room ( http://www.boneroom.com/ ) has a pretty good stock of interesting people parts most of the time.