Messages from the boneyard.

Flickr is a lot like my high school annual. It has thousands of pictures of people I don't know. I decided to do a search for the odd and curious stuff. Anything peculiar, queer or uncouth would do. It was then that I learned something that would keep me awake at night. I made the mistake of using the explore option to research zombies. I didn't need to know that zombies desire human flesh or that they are unfailingly tenacious in their attempts to obtain it. The only good news was that they are are really dumb. I thought it best to move along.

So I decided to venture off into another area. Instead of the undead I'd look into the really very dead. What I uncovered, digging into this subject, was that graveyards are facetious and witty places. I found an auctioneer who had "Going, going, gone!" as his epitaph, a Mr. Pease who's gravestone read, "Pease is not here. Only his pod." I found a monument to a young man erected "by his grateful family" and another marker claimed that the man buried there was the "only surviving son" of Admiral Vernon.

As a warning to us, I suppose, many people had to tell you how they died. One claimed it was from eating crab, another claimed that bananas had done him in. One man died choking on a fish bone. I didn't find this unusual, but then there was the woman who claimed her death was due to eating a watermelon. Then there is the hypochondriac who's marker reads, "I told you I was sick."

Ultimately, it is nice to know the dead are really dead and will stay put. It is also nice to know that they have a sense of humor. Some names on grave markers, for example, set you to thinking. Names like: Yul B. Next, Willy Rott, U.R. Gone, Barry M. Deep, Izzy Gone, I. Emma Ghost and Sue D. Bum. One of the best epitaphs I came across was written by a woman who had shot her errant husband and I am sure wrote his epitaph from her jail cell with a big satisfied smile on her face. It read, "At least I know where he's sleeping tonight."

Flickr got me to thinking that maybe I should ponder what I want on my headstone. During my researach I came across a picture on Flickr of the marker of the man with a thousand voices, Mel Blanc. His marker says, "That's all folks!" It seemed so final that I had an immediate vision of Peggy Lee singing "Is that all there is?" So I sat in my kitchen and gave it some thought. I'm vacillating between two choices. Either, "I just knew this was going to happen." or, from Longfellow, "From dust thou art to dust returnest was not spoken of the soul." What do you think?