i see dead people

i like cemeteries.

i know it's weird, but i can't help it. blame it on my dad. i like to blame lots of things on my dad, and my cemetery fetish is one of them. he used to take us on vacations and once we reached our destination, he would find the nearest cemetery to check out. i think we've probably visited a cemetery in every state that we've travelled to, including one u.s. colony.

i guess i never really thought that it was weird until we went to a cemetery with some relatives and my cousin pointed out a gravestone that indicated an aunt of some sort. i think that was one of the first times i had gone to a cemetery to actually visit a relative and for some reason it struck me as odd. i thought that people went to cemeteries all the time to hang out. you know... because it's... quiet... or something. it's funny, but in retrospect, i never really even tried to rationalize our cemetery visits. i just kind of accepted them for what they were and tolerated them as another wacky family dysfunction.

one time we went to go visit one of those new-fangled cemeteries that only has plaques in the ground instead of headstones towering tall. the headstones are all spaced exactly eight feet apart in length, no more, no less, and the lawn is mowed to a height so precise you could take a caliper to each blade of grass and it would all measure up exactly the same. we were driving around in the minivan when we passed a funeral. my dad was blasting opera from the stereo and we drove slowly past the mourners with the italian music blaring from the little red toyota minivan. i couldn't tell if they looked unhappy because the music was so godawful loud or if they looked unhappy because they were at a funeral. i'm guessing it's probably both.

we had been going to cemeteries for as long as i can remember. one of my earliest vacations i can remember involved a trip to san diego where my dad had conveniently found a cemetery that sat adjacent to the 'dennis the menace' playground. i ran around on the slides and swings while my dad walked passed all the headstones, reading epitaphs and years.

i didn't consciously realize it, but once i started going to uc santa cruz, i almost immediately found the local cemetery. it was over a hundred years old and contained the graves of civil war veterans and chinese people who had built the railroad. the headstones were old and pitted, some of the mausoleums had been broken into or simply collapsed upon themselves from age. the skeletons and dust faced a baseball field that saw a game of children running around its bases at least once a day. the freeway sped next to it all, spitting noise and pollution towards the redwood niche that carefully held the graves.

jordan and i used to hang out at the cemetery a lot. it was quiet. nobody bothered us. we would sit on one of the memorial benches and smoke pot while looking out at the darkened baseball field. every now and then we'd hide behind some gravestones as a police flashlight shone up at us from the street. unlike popular teenage films from the eighties, there were no zombies, vampires or other undead who harassed us, regardless of how funny or exciting that situation would have been.

all in all, the dead don't really seem to mind that you're hanging out with them.

<11.06.01>

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