ISawArkansas

There is great pleasure in sharing useless knowledge.

For instance, obituaries can be traced back to ancient Rome when Daily Acts written on papyrus were distributed to people on the street, letting them know which prominent people had died.

Today, ancestry.com has more than 260 million obits. Most of them are short, since before the1880s type had to be set by hand.

During the Civil War, there were tens of thousands of obits each year. Today, death notices are submitted to newspapers by local funeral homes that provide the family of the deceased with a standard form.

Obituaries are published to announce to people who among them had died. They were different than a Death Notice, which often ran in the classified section as a matter of public record so creditors could file a claim against the estate, or a great-nephew could claim to be a survivor in case there was money to be distributed among family.

Some people needed funeral information, and others just like scanning a person’s short bio.

After the 9/11 attacks, The New York Times compiled and printed short accounts of the life of each of the nearly 3,000 people who were killed that day. These short stories sort of kept the victims alive, or brought them back to life, for as long as it took to read.

We shared all of this last Sunday, when rather than sitting in the garage we sat in wingback chairs close to the woodstove in the living room.

“Thich Nhat Hanh said there is no birth and no death, and how does that work?”

It didn’t take us long to figure out that it’s all about the body, and the body doesn’t exist in the pre-life or the afterlife. But that Bingo! didn’t stop us from percolating useless information.

“Maybe he meant that life is an illusion,” the college grad retired guy said.

“Maybe he meant we just need to forget about the body and focus on the head because we can’t attach our thoughts to our bodies,” the other college grad who’s always had part-time jobs and part-time girlfriends said.

Part of the joy of Sunday beer with the boys is that they rarely agree. One likes .38s, the other .45s. Guns. They both like 45 rpm records. One has children, the other has a dog. One’s been vaxxed, the other, wouldn’t touch it.

I would follow either of them into the dark.

“Well, the brain does always protect us, above all else,” I offered. “We put a special burden on the heart, lungs and liver. Not because we drink, smoke, worry, eat animal fat or watch TV, but because our brains are so good at saying, ‘Everything’s all right, go for it.’ It’s hard to exercise your brain. You can do crosswords or jigsaws, but your brain really simply alerts you to love or danger when you’re awake and talks to your other organs while you’re asleep. The brain is our custodian.”

“Maybe that’s why Thich said there is no birth, there is no death,” said the one who reloads his own ammo. “Because he knew that to be contented with thoughts, we have to quiet down and massage our mental impulses more than our bodies. If we train our thoughts rather than our calorie intake it would be more like being in a realm where we’re not so needy and unjustified.”

“Everybody wants the cheap seats, that’s why there’s more of them.” That came from the one who writes down his mileage and the price of gas every time he fills up. He’s done that for two generations.

And he was right. “Cheap seats are where the diehard fans sit. A cheap seat for the Super Bowl is $3871 and there were only two left for Sunday’s game when I checked last night.”

“Did you say diehard? A diehard is one who opposes change. That goes back to obits, diehard does.” He cleared his throat, begging for pun acknowledgment.

We also talked about politics, but guess what? We were not in agreement. One of them said we have the government we deserve, the second one said, “You’re out of your mind,” and I wondered if any of us ever really gets what we deserve.