I think the idea of mortality is really interesting — how we all know that we and everyone else is going to die but we kind of just avoid that fact. One of the big benefits of religion is that it provides comfort to people about their mortality. But as someone who doesn't bother with all of that hocus pocus, death is something that is really puzzling to me.

Life is actually more puzzling to me. Why are we here and all that jazz. I always hate asking that question because people will tell me “it's up to you to come up with your own purpose” and that's cool and all but THAT'S NOT WHAT I'M ASKING. I'm trying to ask why we are conscious in the first place? What does consciousness even mean? What is it? Why in this universe? If the universe is some sort of collection of mathematical truths or something, why does only this universe exist? Things like that. When I ask people about this and they have no idea what I'm talking about, it makes me think that maybe they just aren't conscious like me.

Anyway, this is a side tangent. Philosophers and theologians have been saying all of this crap for milennia; I'm not adding much to the conversation. I will almost certainly never learn the answers to these questions, and I wonder if anyone ever will. Maybe the answers don't exist. Maybe I just need to take LSD or something, I don't know.

If I was old and I knew I was about to die, I would do all sorts of illicit drugs. Why not? I'm gonna die soon anyway. Like I wanna know what heroin is like — is that so bad? Don't worry government, if you're reading this, I'm not actually gonna do it for like 60 years at least and by that point I might have changed my mind so I don't think you can arrest me. But I think I might as well try to have the full range of human experience while I'm here.

Someone told me a story of how this old lady with some terminal illness was hiding Nutter Butters in their cabinet even thought she wasn't supposed to have them. My first reaction was that they should listen to their doctors. But on second thought, I think fuck it. Let that woman eat her Nutter Butters!!! If I was about to die, I would enjoy myself. Of course, “about to die” is relative — maybe I should indulge in myself now. “Live each day as if it were your last”. But as the famous online comedian Miel put it, “That's actually not a good saying, is it? Because if you don't die, you're gonna be kinda rough when you're old. It's gonna be hard for you.”

Wait ok now I'm actually done. I started thinking about this because I saw some of my ancestors' graves today for the first time. They were my great great grandparents. It's sad to think that soon, everyone who knew them will be gone. All will be left will be their graves. They had all these lichens on their graves, and it looked like no one had cleaned them in decades. We almost missed them because their names weren't totally visible. We cleaned the graves off with our shoes.

I know next to nothing about them. I wonder what they were like. Were they funny or serious? Were they smart? What were they interested in? What did they do besides be born and die? I may never know. The worst part is, I don't really care. And that scares me, because people in the future won't care about me.

If I don't have children, it will be even worse. No one will have a reason to remember me decades after my death. Therefore, I will have children just so that I show up in peoples' ancestry charts. But is that how I define my worth? By how much people think of me? Why do I care?

Ok wait I'm gonna stop this now. People have said this already. Here is why I'm actually writing about death. I was looking at some of the other graves, and as it got more modern I saw more and more graves that looked absolutely horrible. Like so fucking cheesy. And usually when I see cheesy stuff, I make an inner note that I will never do that. That's how you develop taste. But that process hit a block: I might not design my gravestone.

I am not going to have my body under a gravestone that looks like it was designed in Microsoft Paint. I refuse. So I am going to give a few guidelines for my gravestone here.

1. ONE. I don't want some shitty font on my gravestone. If there is ARIAL on my gravestone oh my god. Even Times New Roman looks like a document. Give me one of the classics. A serif font. A sans serif looks cheap, and oh my god please not a script font. I also don't want blackletter text, it looks cheesy. I also notice that all caps tends to look good.
2. TWO. I don't want “RIP” on there. It's like the crying emoji 😭 or the skull emoji 💀 it's just so deeply unserious
3. THREE. I saw this phenomenon of having something in quotes at the bottom like “A beloved mother, wife, and sister” and to that I say, “why the quotes?” Get rid of the quotes. Having some saying like that is iffy to begin with, but putting quotes makes it look so bad.
4. FOUR. NO GRAPHICS. Obviously no cross, but if you put some png dove on my gravestone I will haunt you. I think roses or ivy or some plants like that can be done tastefully, but it's very risky and so I would say probably don't. Some decorative lines or flourishes are fine. I saw someone put a book shape surrounding the text, and please don't do that dear lord.
5. FIVE. Include the essentials. Full name, full dates of birth and death. The amount of stones that didn't have some of this was crazy to me. (For me, I'd prefer my middle name to be a middle initial because of my last name situation.)
6. SIX. Make it durable. If you're gonna spend money on this, spend it to make sure that it will last. I don't need bells and whistles.
7. SEVEN. Some formatting. Use an en dash, no hyphen. Please. Write dates without the “th”s at the end of the numbers. Spell out the months if you can.
8. EIGHT. Don't spend a lot of money on a gravestone. I am dead — does it really matter?

also happy new year