It's Just a Hunk of Stone

As I wandered through the cemetery on Friday I was thinking about what life is, how it works.

I was surrounded by thousands of people whose lives were over. They did what they did, lived as they lived and the only thing to commemorate them is a hunk of stone with some words and dates on them.

There are so many gravestones that say nothing at all - just the dates and the names. Sad. There are even gravestones with nothing but a last name on them. No dates, no comments. Sadder. Those typically are very small, easy to stumble over if you are not paying attention.

Which is easy to do. Sometimes I am focusing on individual gravestones, sometimes I am looking up and around absorbing the silence and finality of it all.

Even the graveyard is a commentary on wealth and the lack of it. How fucking petty. How fucking human. 

There are massive stones with fancy carvings that just blow your mind. Entire families - generations of them - buried in family plots. I came across a huge gravestone surrounded by ten small gravestones - five on each side of the main one. The main one was the parents, the ten smaller ones were children and grandchildren. That felt odd to me. Close even in death. Talk about controlling parents.

And then there are the tiny stones with only a last name on them.

Personally I don't believe the rich assholes got any more of a leg up on death than the poor folk.

I wonder how many of these people died happy. I am willing to bet it is a very small percentage. 

There are plenty of people who will lie to you and tell you they are happy, but most of them are cowards, afraid to admit to the truth. These are the "suck-it-up" people who go home at night and drink alone and cry.

Most of us get trapped by life and its evil lies and hollow promises. Most of us end up living the same empty lives.

The Godfathers have a song titled "Birth-School-Work-Death." Pretty well sums it up.

Such a sad commentary on what it means to be human.

I am fighting hard to change that narrative. Frankly, birth-school-work pretty well sums up my life so far. I am holding off on the death thing for now. I have a lot of mistakes and wasted time to make up for and not a lot of time to do it in.

But it does feel like I can make some kind of dent in this life thing, some kind of progress that would provide meaningful words for my gravestone.

Then again I could just be full of shit.