on death and specimens

 

A friend brought me a giant joint from the dispensary and while I have only been smoking a little bit by bit to get to sleep some nights, the thoughts it brings, this particular strain, seem to be more chaotic than the others I have on hand.  I was convinced Saturday one night that my father would die alone in his house in his bed and it could be days before someone knew (thus there had to be some sort of un-obnoxious way to check in daily through e-mail or text or some robo-call system).  Then, as always, that I too could die this way for no particular reason, and no one would know until I failed to show up to work. Years ago, there was a fight between a couple upstairs--loud, with what sounded like a Christmas tree falling over and someone breaking down a door.  I could hear crying and talking afterwards, so I didn't think anyone was in danger, but two nights later, the police came knocking on my door and someone mistakenly had thought it was happening in my apartment, though I'm not sure how. I was very obviously alive, so I told them they might want to check upstairs, but I never learned what they may have found.  For weeks, I was convinced there had been a body up there, so much so that when I was watching Mulholland Drive for the first time during the holiday break, I had a panic attack after seeing the scene of the decomposing body in the bed.  Before they moved, my sister and her husband lived across the hall from an older  man who died alone.  Days before, when she mentioned on FB that the hallway smelled like garbage, I joked that it was probably a body.  It was. 

As someone who lives alone, even though I have regular contact with others who might know I'm missing, I've long reconciled that I may very die alone and be eaten by my cats (though if that's what keeps them alive, it's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make.)  Sometimes I joke that Moxie has a tendency to gnaw on my arm for attention while I sleep, and I say she's getting a head start if it's been too long since I moved.  It's morbid, but not the most morbid thing in my mind sometimes. Last night, I kept imagining my mother in the cremation chamber.  The details of her skin--her eyes, her skull, going up in flames.  Sometimes, weed is great and makes me happy.  Sometimes, it get s a little spirally and I have to rein it in. The sleep, however, when it comes feels deep and I wake up easily afterwards. 

I thought of this weirdness again as I dug a little deeper on my Walter Potter research for the next themed project.  All of those tiny kitten corpses arranged and clothed anthromorphically.  How much they freaked people out (and continue to do so) much more than regular sorts of taxidermy. Someone I know once mentioned that shed helped take care of a cache of the Potter dioramas in the home of a local heiress, whose giant dogs broke the glass.  I don't remember which creatures it involved, but she had been tasked with carefully and meticulously picking out the glass shards from the bottom of the case among the taxidermied animals and it had to be repaired. The kitten ones in particular trouble me, though the others are just as disturbing. According to what I've read, Potter secured kittens from farmers who euthanizing them to control the populations as they often do. All of the animals, in fact, sourced from the public for his dioramas. 

Somewhere there is a kinship between Potter and Cornell, and perhaps that is another project altogether, but I think I might focus my writing project on this particular one, since it's roots are mired in the child's nursery rhyme and so that is linguistically a launch point. I weirdly know quite a bit about Victorian death customs from other projects and research, so that information will no doubt come in handy. We shall see how it goes...