Celebrating Death
I started attending funerals in my early 20’s. Ex-wife’s parent. Then a motorcycle rider buddy. Old roommate. Then a friend of a friend. A distant customer.
After that, it was friends, and friends of friends.
Not that mortality or death hasn’t been a constant companion in my life, looming large and overhead, like a spectral figure, no, nothing new.
Celebrating Death
Undoubtedly documented elsewhere, but I can’t seem to find it, my old skull ring story.
“Memento Mori.”
But I tend to think of the skull as a jeering companion, a jester’s joke.
The daughter of a business associate graduated college — SouthWest Texas (now UT San Marcos) — and flirted heavily with me. I demurred, and the only reasonable recollection, “We can go steady when you give me a skull ring with ruby eyes.”
Years go by.
I saw a skull ring in a dollar store with that cheap pot-metal ring sporting red gemstone-like eyes. I overnighted it to her, no note, no real indication, but it was amusing at the time. I lived in old East Austin — long before gentrifications and high rise apartments.
Years go by.
Maybe twenty years distant? In London one summer with my sister, I happen across the Crazy Pig Designs, and I wind up with rock star ring, custom-made with ruby eyes, an homage to that Sagittarius, then, and now?
“Memento Mori.”
It’s a joke, a darkly humorous bit for myself, and not-so-subtle reminder.
Celebrating Death
Skull Ring – Crazy Pig Designs
Celebrating Death
It’s a joke, a darkly humorous bit for myself, and not-so-subtle reminder.
6:8 “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”
Excerpt From The Revelation of Saint John the Devine
The King James Version of the Bible
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- A Very Private Grief • 2017
- Austin Requiem • 2008
- Southern Gothic Horror • 2008
- Requiem for the cat • 2008
- Funerals • 2002
- West Texas Funeral • 1995
- Camera: iPad Pro (11-inch)
- Flash fired: no
- Focal length: 3mm
- ISO: 500
- Shutter speed: 1/24s
