Do You Realize?

Underbunny

The Last Man on Earth

Work is slow. I have endless hours to surf the net, and find myself looking at Flickr, Friendster, and MySpace accounts in an endless stream of personality delivered on a six degrees of separation basis. From profile to profile I am allowed access into the lives o f the general public from my dimly lit office that I share with Remington, who maintains the facade that we're busy for me. There is only so much you can learn by looking at someone's profile online, it's a controlled presentation, but the details are still there. Their likes, dislikes, who they hang out with, who they love, and where they work. And you can get specific, limiting your searches to the unifier of the masses, popular culture.

While searching Flickr for people who like Margaret Atwood, I came across the profile of a woman in Seattle that is an undertaker. Her job is to administer the techniques that keep the deceased looking alive and peaceful long enough to allow for the ceremonies that we associate with death. The images on her profile were calming in contrast to another profile that I ran into earlier in the week while doing an advanced search of single women that lived within 5 miles of my postal code, and listened to Glass Candy. One of the results had a MySpace avatar image that looked like an abstract painting as a thumbnail, but when enlarged, and after some examination, revealed itself to be the bloated, bleeding face of a dead woman. The only way I could tell this was that there were other photos in her profile that showed the body wearing white panties. The images were horrific, how could something as lovely as a woman look like this? They looked like alien autopsy images stolen from area51. The face was barely recognizable as such, the head was the shape and size of a basketball, and the skin was waterlogged and disgustingly translucent. No longer human, the body was now a living reef for the process of decomposition. A host to another type of life.

The undertaker, known on Flickr as Underbunny, had photographs that were different, but equally unsettling. Injected with loss and humanity, but juxtaposed with the clinical reality of her task at hand, which was to perform a medley of age old procedures to keep a body recognizable long enough so that a loved one could say goodbye. The pictures had more of an effect on me emotionally than the gruesome waterlogged cadaver pictures posted by the adolescent woman on MySpace. The Underbunny made me think too much about what inevitably is on the way.

When I was married I used to fear the day that I would have to say goodbye to my wife, how foolish I was to think it would come late in life. The downfall of loving someone supposedly forever, is that one will eventually outlast the other. To risk such loss so late in life was something I found terrifying. More often than not, the one left behind succumbs to death within months from sheer lonliness and loss. I guess I should be happy that my wife left me when she did. I suffered her absence when I was young. I suspect that when we die we'll scarecly know each other, and it seems more bearable this way. Still, I remember a moment when we were together, she was standing in front of me and I had a weird premonition of what she would look like as an older woman. She looked lovely, and I felt content. I imagined our daughter as a grown woman coming to visit us living in some kind of rural bliss, which seems insane when I think back about it now.

Surfing all that profile porn took me to five o'clock quickly, but left me with a melancholic reminder that we will all die one day, and we will be alone. The rain fell hard on the roof of the bus on the way home, and I realized that I am more prepared for death than I am for life. If financial planning is any indication of longevity, all signs point to me living everyday as my last. I have no savings. Retirement is an abstract concept. Everyday I age a little more. Eventually my body will fail and I will no longer be able to work. I've spent too much time on the east side lately, where the elderly that have no one wind up, mixed together with the young addicts that look as old as they do. On and off the bus they go, confused, underfed, aimlessly riding the roughest routes with no apparent destination. I was sitting at the front of the #20 earlier this week listening to my iPod and could hear a woman yelling over top of the music to an older fellow sitting across from the driver with his shirt undone all the way to his belly, "If you're going to Carrall you have to get off and get a bus back that way!" Over and over she repeated this in a loud helpful tone. The old man sat there, disinterested in help, lost in his confusion, content to ride the entire route for the fare he likely didn't even pay for over and over again.

My daughter, who had just finished spending a week with me left last night. The house is always eerily quiet when she leaves. I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no money to help time along. So I watched a Vincent Price movie in bed on my laptop. It was called The Last Man on Earth, and Vincent Price played the role of a doctor named Robert Morgan. In the movie the world has suffered an airborne pandemic, killing everyone except for Robert Morgan. Everyone that wasn't burned when they died, is now a zombie/vampire and after the last living human. Vincent Price's character fills his days with the mundane task of keeping the undead from getting into his small home. While the vampires sleep, and recoil from the sunlight of the day, he restocks his home with a fresh supply of garlic, mirrors, and wooden stakes, preparing for his nightly battle. When the sun falls his home is surrounded by death, he tunes out the sound of the haunting outside his home by blasting jazz on a record player while smoking, drinking, and watching movies of his family, along with found reels of humans at work and play. He voyeuristically experiences life from his small, dark fortress while death surrounds him constantly. He is alone, filling the hours of the night as best he can, day in and day out. Years go by as he waits for death, fighting it all the way, lamenting it, and remembering all too well what it was like when things weren't like that; when he was in love.