Put the fun back in funeral
So in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey he says to begin with an end in mind as the second habit. Covey writes about imagining your funeral and what you want people in different aspects of your life to say about you. This may be the most extreme version of reverse engineering. Then I guess you live your life accordingly. Try not to fuck anyone over and do good. Tip well and help where needed.
I think of this often especially since I’m out living my father by two years. In fact of out lived a number of friends and family due only to luck. It’ll happen eventually but when I go I want to put the fun in my funeral. So here’s what I want.
A kegger or open bar at the wake and if I’m open casket put a party hat on me. I know it’s considered tacky but I’m encouraging selfies with my corpse. Maybe sit me up Weekend at Bernie’s style. If that’s too expensive maybe a cremation but I want my ashes in little glass bottles to be shared as souvenirs. I’m just spit balling here having a laugh. Of course you can’t have a funeral without music. Here’s a suggested playlist.
The Jack in the Box music so people my thing I’ll pop out of the box.
“Another One Bites the Dust” – Queen
“If I Ever Leave this World Alive”- Flogging Molly
“Harder Than You Know”- Public Enemy
“Float On” – Modest Mouse
“Let’s Go Crazy”- Prince
“You’re Dead”- Norma Tanega (What We Do in the Shadows Theme)
“Highway to Hell” AC/DC
In other words I don’t want tears when I go. I want people to be uncomfortable because I made them laugh at my funeral. Oh yea I don’t want a religious ceremony. I’ve gone to Catholic ceremonies where you’re an extra in the life of Jesus. Doesn’t he already have Easter and Christmas? If praying helps you mourn fantastic but laughter always works for me.
Hopefully this is fifty years or so from now and I still have my wits and bowel control. In the meantime, keep living.
So I’m on vacation. In five days I’ll be forty-two which means I’m another year closer to death. Then again who knows, it could be a week or fifty years so yolo. Anyhow that’s downer and something I’ll talk about in another post. So I took this vacation with a plan in mind. You want to hear about it?
The Plan
So I took off work not to go on any travel adventure but specifically to work on creative projects and this being one of them. I work a lot and that work is on someone else’s dream. My dream however doesn’t include opening and closing a cash register. It’s one of creative pursuits with the possibility for enough money to travel and enjoy life to it’s fullest for the next fifty years. How am I going to do this?
I’m glad you asked, reader. I began my vacation by working on an outline for a screenplay. Its an over the top story of an uber driver with a grow house to simplify it. I spent hours on it then hit a wall. After hitting the metaphoric wall I decided to go out drinking. The fun part of weekend drinking is running into people you almost never see. Of course this socializing helps with dialogue as well. The problem with drinking is that my body doesn’t handle it like it used to. Hangovers were a half day ordeal then like a champ your back at it hours later. Now my stomach makes me atone for the sins of the night before. I’m rambling.
So now my hangover is gone and it’s Sunday. I could go to church but I’m not feeling sociable at the moment. Also not religious so there’s that. Anyhow in the next five days I will post three videos on my YouTube channel, write a first draft for THC (working title) and I’ll be typing on this blog.
Of course like Jack Torrence wrote, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” I gotta have some fun. It’ll include a little bit of touristing the local sites, some more drinking and a bike trip somewhere. Maybe I’ll get into the habit of daily posting. Anyway I’m out for now.
This is my favorite “I’m a pretentious writer” pic. By the way I grew up poor in the eighties and a Salvation Army typewriter sucked way worse than the keyboard on my laptop I’m using now. The ink ribbon would tangle and keys would get jammed and then God forbid you had to edit anything then you get a whiteout strip and type over your mistakes. Years later in the nineties I got to used a Smith Corona word processer and wow the difference. I had all sorts of journey entries saved a floppy disk to. So here I am in the blogsphere and you can be too. Though I warn you reader its a treacherous road that can lead to madness.
To begin
So you want to be a blogger. First decide what you want to write about and why. Is this business or pleasure to simplify? If it’s business than you need to narrow your writing to a specific niche and become an expert on search engine optimization. It gets very complex but people have found a way to make a living blogging about gluten free diets for corgis in Omaha, Nebraska.
I’m not that blogger this will be all over the place. From there you can advertise and get sponsors and affiliates. This helps monetize while you sleep or battle insomnia depending on your lifestyle. Get a name, sign up for hosting, and a platform. I used my Pen Name that’s another story I think I already told. I’m on Bluehost. Their customer service is excellent whenever I feel I need help. Through Bluehost I use WordPress. Now you need a Theme which is the first impression your reader will see. It can look simplistic, feminine, masculine, artsy, futuristic, etc. This is your face for readers to see. Then things will get complicated and technical.
Right now I’m trying to set up auto sharing for my blog posts. Basically that means I when I hit publish it will automatically go to twitter and my Facebook page. However in order to do that I had to copy some coding in a social sharing pluggin and had to walk away. So yeah that was fun.
Eventually you get to write and post pictures as you like. My best advice for newbs is to learn everything you can before you start. Expect to fail and learn from it. that’s it for now on my misadventures in blogging. As things go wrong I’ll post it to let you the reader know what not to do here.