Dying business

I feel odd about this whole dying business.

First of all, the business side. The rooms you put these people in are expensive, if you can humor me an understatement. Hella expensive. The good ones are, if you’d like me to particularize. Also, the very home of the body is one hell of an expense as well: the coffin. Again, the good ones, but there comes a threshold of “good” which becomes outrageous. I guess I saw it on a Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode once, how the coffin with this particular kind of cushion and whatnot ends up hurting the rotting body when it’s beneath the soiled earth. And before you attack me with disregarding custom, I understand how we revere our dead and envelope them with rituals—it’s part of grieving and moving on, as excellently portrayed in the film Departures. But there’s “apt” and there’s “outrageous” and the fact that outrageous costs more and we actually buy these expensive sons of bitches is what’s getting me. Well, not really buy as in we shell out money out of our own volition—it’s more of we’re coaxed into buying them by a system which exploits our grievances and our lack of mental focus. So there’s that.