The Arrangement

Last night I was celebrating my newish television by watching King Kong in 1080p. It was that part where Kong was running amuck in downtown Manhattan looking for Scarlet Johansson amongst the sea of blondes in Times Square. He picks them up one at a time, takes a closer look, and cast them aside in disgust – presumably to their deaths. I am quite sure this brief scene had the wrong effect on me. I am sure the look of frustration and fright on Kong’s face in combination with such a feral act was meant to incite sympathy in the great beast, but instead I couldn’t help but think of those people that died during the rampage of a gigantic ape. I thought about how random and bizarre their deaths would seem to other people. Their immediate relatives would be devastated and their casual acquaintances would laugh themselves silly (“You hear about Bob, from accounting? He was on a trolley when it got derailed by the biggest monkey you ever saw!”) Maybe these people would have provincial relatives that would use the giant ape related deaths as further justification for living in the sticks, I mean, that stuff happens in a city like New York.

By the time Stopwith Camels were strafing the fearsome animal with machine gun fire I was full on in my musings on the topic of mortality. I remember a time when movies had a tendency to spare the innocent bystander from whatever peril was going on- how many people did you see Godzilla actually stomp? – But as moviegoers became more desensitized to the violence the filmmakers had to up the ante. Now no one is safe, and the effect it has on me is to show that life can randomly end at any point for no good reason. One day you leave work and decide to stop by Woolworths to get some gingham for you wife and maybe a licorice whip for you kid and them BLAMO, crushed to death by an uncontrolled tropical ape. You could just live your life in a completely boring and unobtrusive way, it doesn’t matter. One simply never knows when providence will see fit to drop a rampaging behemoth in your life.

It is for reasons like this that my several friends and I have taken the time to make our funerary wishes known. So if the unthinkable –re: plague of scorpions – where to happen, there would be those around us who know what we would have wanted with our earthly remains.

One of my friends wants his body to be lit aflame and launched from a catapult to be the opening salvo in a land war between East and West Lafayette, Indiana. We have long wondered how the university kids of Purdue would fair vs. the Hoosier townies if it ever came to arms, and we thought that if we had a corpse to get rid of we could kill two birds with one stone. The only catch is that, as per the deceased, the catapult used could not be crafted by mortal hands. It had to be an un-manmade catapult. The possibility of an extraterrestrial trebuchet surfaced but was quickly overshadowed when another friend of ours pointed out (it should be noted, here, that this guy had taken an epic dose of psilocybin mushrooms when he thought of this) that according to Ministry Jesus build hotrods, so why not artillery? Thus was born, The Jesus Catapult.

Another guy I know took many of his cues from Nordic tradition. In his case we are to dress him in the finest tuxedo we can afford, place him in a Viking longboat along with a carton of camel non filter cigarettes, a full wet bar, and a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Then we have to find a blonde virgin to recite the funerary passage from The Thirteenth Warrior and lay in the boat. After launching it into Lake Michigan in full view of the steel mills, one of us has to shoot lit arrows Rock of Gibraltar style until we score a hit and watch it burn. Then we imagine that when the boat comes to rest on the shore it had passed into an ethereal plane coexisting with our own. From that point on our friend’s shade would follow us around with a martini in one hand and smoke in the other like a perpetual rat packer in the hereafter to whisper wisdom and encouragement in the ears of the friends he left behind when life has them most downtrodden. I’m not sure what happens to the blonde.

With me, I have a funeral set up in my mind that is fittingly grandiose to commemorate a monstrous ego like mine. This funeral would include my corpse reanimated marionette style to deliver my own eulogy before being joined by Cirque Du Soleil in a fully choreographed tap-dance routine to I’m Your Turbo Lover by Judas Priest. Then my friend rides on horseback into the funeral home in full Scottish battle regalia a proclaims “you’ve bled with Ebner, now bleed with me!” then he steals my body, lashes it to the front of a semi trailer and barrels it into the Bar at the Court Restaurant in Valpo, while Too Old to Rock n Roll and Too Young to Die by Jethro Tull plays on a loudspeaker and the back of the trailer reveals an 44 cal. Machinegun nest that another friend is using to lay waste to the Valparaiso city seat of government.

I think it’s important to have a plan.