Paramedics show up, study you thoroughly and agree that while they can’t see any apparent sign of death, you are, indeed, dead, and ask you to climb aboard the ambulance. You’re taken to the temporary corpse storage that hospitals have.

On the way there you ask them whether this kind of shit happens often, and while they won’t look at you, the paramedics agree that they’ve never had a talking corpse before, though they won’t question the fact that you’re moving on your own.

You’re eventually led to a morgue, where you’re shown a slab to lay on, and at this point you don’t really even question it, you just climb onto the Corpse Shelf and lay down, maybe have a little nap, with no idea what’s going to happen next.

Then you wake up to someone walking into the morgue, who has the shit scared out of them when you move, and they’re like “dude what the fuck, you’re not supposed to be here, this place is for storing dead bodies” and when you’re like “aw man sorry I thought I was a dead body” they have no idea whether you’re joking and they don’t care, you’re just chased out of there.

And you just kinda go home and take a shower, show up to work normally the next day and nobody questions it.

Exactly! Instead of an NFT linked to an ugly computer generated image or art stolen from someone else, you get a certificate with a photo of a polar bear and a cute stuffed polar bear to cuddle with, along with the knowledge that you're supporting efforts to protect arctic ecosystems and endangered animals :)

Here are a few:

Aussie Ark - Adopt a Tasmanian Devil, a Koala, an Easter Quoll, a Squirrel Glider or a Brush-Tailed Rock Wallaby. https://www.aussieark.org.au/adopt/

A Whale Museum - Adopt an orca, also for classroom adoptions for children https://whalemuseum.org/collections/adopt-an-orca

WDC - Adopt a whale-program https://adopt-us.whales.org/

Big Cat Sanctuary - Adopt a feline like a Tiger, a Black Jaguar, a Snow Leopard etc. The list on your right has all adoptable felines. https://thebigcatsanctuary.org/marketplace/

The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee - Adopt an Elephant https://shop.elephants.com/product/43E6178/adopt-an-elephant

The Shark Trust - Adopt a Shark https://www.sharktrust.org/Pages/Category/adopt

World Animal Protection - Adopt a Bear https://www.worldanimalprotection.org.uk/get-involved/adopt-a-bear

They don’t worship Satan - they don’t actually believe in Satan. They call themselves Satanists because Satan is the antagonist in Christian theology.

They are actively trying to promote the separation of church and state, and prevent the US from becoming a theocracy. And their method is genius: they’re fighting religion with religion.

a child 10,000 years ago left a handprint on a wall. they were fingerpainting. a viking climbs up a rock just to carve the words "this is very high" 10ft off the ground. somebody centuries... milennia... ago burned their dinner so thoroughly that they buried the ruined pot in the backyard rather than attempt to clean it. shakespeare got drunk and wrote dick jokes. tutankhamun was a little boy who liked ducks more than anything. a roman carves his name into a monument in another country saying "i was here". a prisoner, centuries ago, in the tower of london scratches lines into the wall as a tally marking the days. a medieval monk scrawls in the margins bemoaning the boredom of his work.

but all of us, every one, has a deep primal need to persist. we leave handprints on the wall, scratch our names into stones, carve initials into a tree, mark our growth as children on a wall, bury little time capsules. write in the margins of a book. hide notes behind the wallpaper.

reaching out into the future to some unknown human long after we're gone to say

here i re-wrote it as a poem to fit your tag

Somewhere far away from me And impossibly long ago, now A mother holds her child up high To leave a handprint on the wall

A man I will never meet Climbs a rock for fun He writes a message on the stone And he says “this is very high”

Somebody, once Cooked a meal and burned it Took the pot to the land outside their house And buried the evidence

An Egyptian king Thousands of years before my birth Wore a shirt embroidered with little ducks And kept it, lovingly, in a chest

In a prison cell within a tower A man stretches out through centuries And marks off the days of his sentence As lines on the wall

A long-forgotten monk Labours over a manuscript by candlelight And writes in the margins He is bored, and he has a hangover

They leave pieces of themselves behind And they say

“I was here I was here please do not forget me I was alive and I loved and I got sick I had a favourite animal I was here. Do you love me? I love you”

Yes, I do. I hold your life between my hands And I see it, and I love you

I scratch my name into a rock On a tree, I carve my initials And the initials of someone I love So very much

I bury a box in my garden And I write in the margins I reach into the future To somebody I do not know

A stranger who will never know me

“Hello, you” I say “I was here, once. I loved and I got sick and I had a favourite colour

please do! i wrote it for you, stranger i will never meet

and if you print it then maybe somebody finds it, somewhere, in the back of a drawer in 100 years and hold it in their hands and love me as i love them

because like……….so does mine? at a certain point each day Grim decides she wants out, and until that happens she a) follows me about SCREAMING, and b) sits atop whatever I’m doing and bites my hands. this is not an exageration

wanna know what I do? I take her out. either supervised in my backyard or on leash in the front

she naps in the sunlight, eats copious amounts of grass, rolls in dirt, and murders butterflies. after 15-30 minutes (equivalent to the time you’d spend on a neighbourhood dog walk) I take Grim back in, and she happily sleeps/plays/cuddles indoors for the remainder of the day

the UK literally had so many pet cats killed by cars and dismembered by wildlife between 2014 – 2018 that the country thought there was a cat serial killer on the loose.  

and that wasn’t the first time, either – the EXACT same situation played out in the UK in 1990 because so many pet cats were dying in “safe neighbourhoods”

you want more information on your “culture”? cats kill 55 million birds per year in the UK.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized – you don’t have to be suffering some great trauma, something unusual and particularly damaging, to feel pain. You don’t have to have lost your entire home in a hurricane to have lost something you truly valued and miss a lot. You don’t have to have had toxic parents to have been denied some things you wanted because they just didn’t have the money, or the resources, or the health.