Family Plot

It’s telling that Obama only made 2.5 million in royalties in 2008.  The industry really is dying, eh?  Crown probably walked away with many more million…but they’re spending a million per title, easily.  So even if they cleared 10 million, that money’s long gone.

You’d think, of all people, Obama’s book sales would make quatrazillions, because even idiots who can’t fucking read buy his books and thumb through them looking for shirtless pictures.  Like my boss.  Well, no, he read them.  I shouldn’t be mean just because he read and loved Life of Pi.

Or should I?  I should have probably shot him as soon as he told me that.  For the sake of Humanity.  Like going back in time and shooting Hitler.  Same principle.  Hitler and people who read and enjoy Life of Pi.

So…so…so this guy…he’s, like, in a raft!  With animals!  And…and…  *KA-BLAM!*

Anyway, I want to talk about my tombstone today.

I’ve decided to go for a statue.  Cribbing from Californication, I’ve decided that my grave will be home to a more than lifesize statue of me in full Scottish regalia.  Though it’ll be more military than the comical statue I’m stealing this idea from.  I’ll have a rifle on my shoulder, and a brave look with a huge red beard.  At the hem of my kilt, just peeking out, will be the head of a gigantic phallus.  That’s the part I’m stealing from Duchovny’s show, but it’s a must.

Alternatively, I was thinking about going the Horatio Hornblower route.  I’ll be dressed in that Napoleonic-era Royal Navy outfit, except without pants and the huge phallus right there out in the open.  I’ll be peering through a telescope at the mountains, a look of stern concentration on my face.

I actually have a grave, so this isn’t just a playful what if.  It’s in Harmony Grove, West Virginia, some distance out of Bridgeport.  We have a large family plot where they’ve been sticking us since 1801.  My grave is there waiting for me, tended by some toothless hillbilly who is a fifth generation caretaker.  He cuts the grass and cleans around the gravestones and gawks at visitors like me as if he’s playing out the plot of Timber Falls in what passes for his brain.

I’m greatly humbled that my grave exists and, being a renter, I’m strangely attached to the only little plot of land that is mine.  I keep toying with the idea of planting a garden or something.  It’s nice to own land, even if it’s just a narrow strip in a field of bones.

My goal is to have one of the above statues in place before I’m 50.  My hope is that this will horrify the more undesirable elements of my family and they’ll choose to be buried in the “auxiliary” family plot in Shinnston.  This is because I don’t want to be surrounded by those fucks for all eternity.  It’s bad enough that my mom is in there, and I’ll be at her feet.  My only hope is that she’s mellowed somewhat.

I don’t know where my dad is.  I told the mortician that he could fuck off, and take the body with him, when I discovered that my dad was deeply in debt.  He’s buried at some military graveyard near Atlanta, I think.  His years in the Army helped keep him from getting dumped in a furnace.

Occasionally I toy with the idea of finding out where he is and visiting the grave.  It seems lonely, to me, that he’s buried and forgotten.  But then I remember that he was a giant fuckwad and deserves whatever sadness he’s heaped on himself in the afterlife…if there is an afterlife.

I alternate between belief and doubt.  Sometimes I hope there’s an afterlife so I can be a ghost and I can go around and watch girls in the shower.  Or just sit around at Harmony Grove and watch people stare at the huge cock on my tombstone statue.

Another thought I had – and this one has me fully clothed – is to go Civil War.  Be in full Confederate uniform and on a horse.  What’s the code again?  All four feet on the ground means I died of natural causes, one foot in the air means I was wounded, and two feet in the air means I was killed in battle.  I think I have to go for the two feet.  So I’ll be on a horse that’s rearing back with two hooves in the air, and there’ll be a big plaque beneath:

General Sir Nacho Sasha 1974-????

While holding this ridgeline against Northern Aggressors in the Battle of Second Wolf Run with a small force of irregulars, General Nacho Sasha was struck in the temple by a musketball.  Gravely wounded, he crawled to the front, took up a rifle from a fallen comrade, and fired into the advancing ranks of blue-belly foulness.  His last words were:

“My dearest Theodora.  I write to thee today in the midst of battle against the hated Yankees.  I hath been mortally wounded and fight even now, in between sentences, to save our way of life.  The men have not had shoes, food, or ammunition for weeks.  We’ve been forced to make roundshot out of dried feces and pebbles.  It is now these excretal balls I fire at my enemy.  I feel the life drain away, Theodora, and I pray to our great Lord and Savior that, some day, I will see you again.  Though that prayer is second to my prayer that the Yankees will go the fuck home.  Jesus.  Seriously.

“Anyway, Theodora, best I go now because they’ve actually run past my position and are charging towards the town, and I can’t feel my hands anymore, and I’m also throwing up blood and screaming at old Charles Esther Jr. who died 15 years ago but appears to be here now poking at my arm and asking me to stop writing and get up.  Don’t forget to lock the back door at night, and you probably want to change the filter on the furnace before it gets real cold.  I was going to do that, but, you know…Um… Okay.  Oh!  I love you.  Yeah.  Okay.  Bye.”