The story goes, back in the day when Paul was a juvenile delinquent (high school, and juvenile delinquent is a major exaggeration), he had a group of close guy friends. They did a lot of partying, a lot of smoking, drinking, drugs, etc. After high school they began to drift further and further apart. Paul quit all that, save for a daily reefer habit. Eventually the other guys did as well, except for this one. His parents found him dead in his apartment Friday when they broke the door down. He'd been lying there for 5 days.
I hate to be so self-centered, but I can't help but feel a little thrown, myself, about this whole thing. Paul had a falling out (sort of) with this guy a few years back. At first I didn't think he would be too affected, but Paul tends to get caught up in the "meaninglessness of life" whenever someone dies. It happened when his dog died, it happened when a close family friend died in June, and I can see it happening now. It makes me sad, and I know he just has to go through it.
It creeps me out though. I was at the apex of an obsession about death and dying last weekend and then had a mini epiphany driving to Indiana and I thought it had sort of passed, but now I'm back with my thoughts drawn to it again: how long can a person be dead and still have an open casket? Paul said it was an OPEN CASKET. WTF! He also told me the guy's mom had told him that she thought the body had been there since Sunday, corroborated by some people he went to a U2 concert with. Paul told me that he looked PURPLE. This is blowing my mind. How can that even be legal?
So I spent an unsavory hour googling and reading way too much about the body's decomposition process, and how much shit happens in that first 5 days. Paul is a pallbearer at the funeral; I'm totally digusted. I made him take a shower when he got back from the wake.
This whole thing is hideous, and again with the self-centeredness: god dammit, why now? Paul told me when we first met about this guy, and how he didn't care if he ever saw him again or something like that. Apparently in 2004 when Paul was living with his ex-girlfriend, the guy came over unannounced and was acting in a way Paul didn't like around the girl. Who knows what that means. But now, poor Paul. If he never heard from this guy again, it wouldn't have mattered, but now he has to be a pallbearer and see a purple corpse and go through this period of meaninglessness, and now I am researching the stages of body decomposition and it's a mess. A mini-mess, but still, a mess. Gross.
We were commenting to each other that death really does seem to be everywhere recently. Dead celebrities, dead friends, dead friends of friends. Murders in my hometown or nearby out the wazoo for the last year. I told Paul that it is probably not unusual, just the inevitable roll of the dice landing on people we happen to know. Pretty sure that is just wishful thinking, and the gambler's fallacy/law of averages fallacy at play.
In other news, I have been a vegetarian for 16 days, and my thirtieth birthday is Tuesday.
Life is weird.
© beotch at
11:38 p.m.
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