Life, Death, & Sporadic Queueing

The Pleasure Principle - Rene Magritte, c.1937

             "I've been thinking a lot recently about death, and I have come to the conclusion that if Heaven exists, it is going to be essentially like the dentists. When I die, a composite representation of my thoughts, electrical signals and for some reason pure white light, will travel upwards, downwards, or side to side, there being no direction in space, there is nowhere that could merit these designations, so I shall imagine simply that I shall travel through and outside of all dimensional realities simultaneously till I reach that great fluffy cloud in the sky, which none but the poorest of commercial flights have ever quite been able to reach.
            When there I will be greeted by a room full of people awkwardly trying to pretend that they are the only other person there, that is too bright and far too clean to the point of becoming sterile. This image of sterility will not be helped by the almost imperceptible but omnipresent sound of Jeff Buckley being piped through the walls and the slightly attractive yet wholly unattainable receptionist who represents all the frustration felt for all the girls who are pretty, fuckable, and yet only smiling at you because they get paid to do it.
            It is then that I will realise I've jumped a queue. The reason I didn't realise this before is because the queue has formed itself in one of the most unlikely and counter intuitive places for a queue to do so. Queues are unintelligent and ignorant beasts, slow and single minded, forming themselves around waterholes of public interest, like coffee shops, cash machines,  and celebrity book signings. Whilst more domesticated than its cousin, crowds, queues are still wild beasts with a collective conscious of frustration and a natural suspicion of anyone who exists outside of it. I would imagine the queue in heaven to be the worst of all, with confused and irate members of the public all pushing, shoving, asking for information, and demanding to know what was with all the Amish, who are presumably thinking much the same thing about everybody else.
           One must at some point decide between whether to become a member of the crowd, or join the queue."

- Eric Luther

Birds, or: How I Learned to Stop Loving and Worry about the Bomb

I once had a bird,
And I loved it, and fed it well.

Other birds,
Became jealous of the attention I got.

So they flew over,
And made nests in my garden.

And they made little eggs,
But little did I know,
They were my bird's little eggs.

And they ate my food,
And drank my water,
So I shot them,
And made bird pie.

My bird was so distressed,
She flew into the next garden over,
And though we called to each other every day,
She refused to come over.

So I shot her,
And made bird pie.

Then there were no birds,
In my garden,
So i cried.

Then one day I saw a bird in another garden,
And I told her I had lots of grain,
And she liked grain
So she came over by night,
And ate my grain,
But then i had no grain,
Because i was still bitter about losing my first bird,
So i shot her as well,
And made bird pie.

And now I have lots of bird pie,
And no birds,
And the problem is,
I like birds,
But i'm sick of bird pie.

An English Poet forsees his Future.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog - Caspar David Friedrich, c.1818

You, who have surveyed its murky oceans
And plumbed its bottomless depths;
Who have dined in its bright restaurants,
And slept in the shadow of its doors.

You, who have felt love's childish clutch upon your arm,
And her stinging caress across your face;
Like a blanket of snow
Beneath the bitting winter's gale.

You, who have seen the jewels of the Orient,
You, the horrors of the third world;
Who have snatched glimpses of its meaning
residing in that great deep.

To have been the wanderer above the mists,
And the lonely traveller beneath the brume,
Is better than to have sat within like I,
My clutching breath a solitary sigh.

In Memoriam Leslie Nielsen

So farewell then, Leslie Nielsen,
As you take to that airplane in the sky;
Where all the passengers are late
But the jokes are all on time.

When you looked death in the eyes
He had come for you too early;
But death shall call when he sees fit,
Though he shall never call you Shirley.

Your comic blend of slapstick and pun
Brought cheer to all in Naked Gun;
And though it was you who saved our Queen,
It is to God you now belong.