Tuesday, May 06, 2008

The dead people.

I cannot stop thinking about the dead people and whether or not they watch you shower. (Explanatory note to tjarrett: check out the items in the sidebars on that list, the "new releases" and the "bestsellers.")

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend, and since I had sent her that link too, she started out our conversation with, "So I understand you're an occultist." She wanted to know if the crystals at our massage therapist's place glow when I walk in the room. Luckily, I had an appointment that afternoon, and since I had never even noticed that she even had crystals, I checked them out. They were glowing!

But back to the dead people, who I cannot stop thinking about. My friend pointed out that it is not that big a deal, because God watches everything, right? But I reasoned, why would God give you a nose and a finger if he did not want you to pick said nose. My concern is that I am not sure that the dead people are as forgiving as God. Nothing against dead people, of course, but there are plenty of living people who I would prefer not to shower in front of--most of them, really.

So now I cannot stop imagining that all the dead people are somehow jammed in my bathroom in the morning, peering over the shower rod or around the curtain. (I hope they have not noticed how mildewed my shower curtain has gotten of late: I expect they are not that forgiving about poor housecleaning either.) Because they are dead people, they probably are not as worried about physical comforts, so given that we have pretty high ceilings, I bet that a lot of dead people can fit in the space of my bathroom. Can dead people see through the shower curtain?

Or do dead people have bodies at all, so is there really not even a question of volume? Do the dead people have to take turns with the shower-watching, or can they all fit in there? Do they sell tickets, make schedules? And why are they so interested in my showering? Shouldn't they be watching you shower? If you and I shower at the same time but in different time zones, can the dead people somehow manage a glimpse of both? And are they only interested in showers? Do dead people watch you sleep? Do they watch you take a crap, now that they don't have noses and so are less offended? Or if they can watch you does that mean that they can also smell you?

How many dead people are in my study right now, watching me type this? Are they making snide comments to each other about my inability to type "the" correctly on the first shot? Or are they saying, "Ooh, ooh, tell them about how we listen to them talking to themselves while they are driving! Tell them we wish they had more sex!" Or would they rather that we not know?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Billy Collins should read this one!

Unknown said...

This is a hilarious riff!

But I have wondered about this before, because a colleague later died in the bathroom of in a home I'd lived in in GA, after I'd lived in there and fixed it up. So I was also worried about future dead people scoping past bathroom activity, but mostly I was disturbed by the fact he died in what I considered MY bathroom.

More like, I considered all times present like a palimpsest. I could imagine myself in the bathtub reading, as I'd often done, and being able to see the future time version of my friend, lying on the bathroom floor nearby, where he'd fallen and remained for 4 warm days until he didn't show up for his classes and someone had to break in and find him.

OK, so I'm disturbed. That house has since been torn down, so where does the time go? I even own that Field Guide to Demons etc. you cite.

But we are scorpios, so this is not too surprising, right? lol.