My parents were married 68 years ago today. Holy shit. That means my oldest brother is pretty damn old, what with him coming along nine months and nine weeks later. They didn’t waste a lot of time back then, right after the war. My folks had to get married in the rectory, what with my dad being “one of them.” Yeah, a Lutheran. A disciple of that dirty Kraut who screwed up the good thing the Catholic church had going back then. I mean, selling people shit that they won’t realize they’ve gotten swindled until after they die is one helluva scam. Just look at the size of those mega churches out there.
So I don’t’ know if you’ve heard this or not, but there’s a consortium of retailers (that include the likes of Walmart, Best Buy, 7-Eleven, and Rite Aid) that are planning an alternative payment system called CurrenC (not to be confused with
Hmm. Greedy retailers like Wal-Mart vs. greedy credit card companies. Tough call there. The CurrenC app requires you to give direct access to your bank account to this “consortium,” which is a dealbreaker for me. With Wallet or Apple Pay, I can use a credit card complete with fraud protection, or I can give my bank info to a single company – Apple or Google – but only if I want to.
It’s pretty handy to be able to tap my phone to pay, but I don’t really use it much, because I have to pull my phone out, turn on NFC (which I don’t keep on all the time – they say it uses negligible battery, but I don’t buy it), and then make sure the app is turned on and available. Whereas with my credit card, I pretty much already have my wallet out because I need to show ID to buy beer (even at my advanced age), and if I’m in a store, I’m pretty much buying beer.
I checked a lot of prices online yesterday between BJs, Costco, and Amazon. Not really a lot of difference there. I would say that Costco sells a wider variety of shit than BJs (you can actually buy caskets from their website), but that’s about it.
UPDATE You can get caskets at BJs online, too. Amazing.
It did remind me I should get busy building a casket for myself. Though I’m kind of leaning toward cremation at this point. I always thought it would be a waste of energy to burn my carcass (I mean, decomposition is free), and I kind of thought a “natural” burial would be better (basically, toss me in a hole). With a coffin something like this (maybe a nice tie-dye one) filled with those cornstarch packing peanuts.
But as I get older, I’m thinking that’s all a lot more trouble than anybody wants to deal with as far as I’m concerned. Find a natural burial “park” (the closest one around here is a fair drive away), the casket or shroud (I guess I could pre-order that), and then scramble to get me in the ground in hurry before I get too stinky.
I mean, if I’m the last one standing (so to speak), by the time they find me I’ll probably be more of a pile of bones in a puddle of goo that they’ll have to use a Shop-Vac to clean up, or somebody I know will have to deal with everything at a time when they shoudl just be enjoying the insurance money. Who wants the bother?
Speaking of bother, I guess I better think about getting ready for work. It’s supposed to be 76° out there today, and a high of 38° with perhaps some snow by Saturday. Whoopie.
This payment thing sounds like another American ponzie scheme in the making. Not sure how, but it is not passing the smell test.
Love that awesome green coffin and it looks like they sell it in Amerika. Me? I wish to use some earthly energy and be burned to smithereens prior to that toxic embalming fluid being injected (I mean, really? You are dead and you need to slow the decay so folks can have a “viewing??? “-funeral homes have a mega lobby, btw- And that embalming crap goes in our waterways and water treatment plants. No way am I contributing to that charade.).
Yeah, it’s either fire or a natural burial for me. This is the place I was looking at a while back. It’s down near Ithaca (of course). But then I’d have to get somebody to drag me all the way down to Ithaca, and who’s gonna wanna bother with that? Plus, nobody will ever come visit. Not that a) they would anyway and b) it will matter to me once I’m dead, but it’s nice to think about while I’m still alive. Ideally, I’d hire somebody to dig a hole out in the woods behind my house and drop me in, but that’s probably illegal in NY State.
Turns out, there’s no law against being buried on private land in NY. Just local laws about how close you can be planted next to water sources and stuff (I guess you wouldn’t rotting corpse runoff in your well).
I guess I’ll have to look into that. For the price of a funeral, I could get myself a backhoe to dig the hole. I wonder if my life insurance would front me the money?
When my mother died she was immediately cremated by the funeral home. No embalming took place. We did not have a funeral. A month or so later we had a memorial gathering at my aunt’s house where we shared some memories and saw relatives and friends we had not seen in a long time.
My father died in 1977 and was also cremated and his ashes were entombed in a cemetary somewhere north of NYC. No one, not even my mother, ever visited. As my mother had requested that her ashes be sent there, I did that.
If I had my druthers I would have sprinkled her ashes in some spot she liked where they could become part of the earth. The most stressful part of it all was getting her ashes to the cemetary. UPS seems to have a policy against shipping human ashes but the nice person at the UPS store took me in the back where she packed and taped the box and sent it on its way.
For a while the cemetary sent notices that, for a price, they would put a Xmas wreath on the vault(?). I always refused and they’ve stopped asking.
This place in Colorado looks pretty cool. Looks like a barbeque grill. I wonder if you could get the funeral director to replace the embalming fluid with gasoline. Now that would be pretty spectacular. Except you wouldn’t be around to see it, so that’s a bummer.