You'll think I'm morbid (and you're right), but the big accomplishment of the weekend was this: I wrote my new epitaph.

I have a list of instructions for my parents in the unlikely event that I should die. I've been keeping it since I was about ten years old, back when I went through my paranoid "Oh-dammit-please-don't-kill-me" phase. (Moral of the story: don't watch late-night History Channel specials on the In Cold Blood murders.)

The list changes every year or two. Originally, I wanted to be cremated. Now, it states very explicitly that I want to become a shrunken head. My hometown's cemetery has two sections; one is wooded and shady, and the other is a huge treeless expanse of grass. I refuse to be buried in a football field. I don't care how much a shady plot costs, Mom, Dad; think of all the money you're saving with me being dead.

I've also gone through several epitaphs. The original was from "First Fig," by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night,
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends;
It gives a lovely light.

Copyright whoever and whatnot. The second was the first/last stanza of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky":

'Twas brilig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

The next two choices were both Vonnegut references; the first was "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt," and the second was "One bird said to Billy Pilgrim: 'Poo-tee-weet?'".

My new epitaph, though, comes from a conversation I had with a friend. Somehow, this seems fitting for a description of my life as yet:

LACKS POETRY, DOESN'T IT?