Wanted: Dead and Alive

It should be pretty damn simple. You're either alive or dead. If you're alive; you're heart is beating, you're breathing, you're farting, and you're hungry. Basically, your body is doing things. It's working, you're alive. If you're not alive, you're dead. Simple. Alive and dead. Mutually exclusive. Right?

Wrong. It's not that simple at all. And I found this out the hard way; by accidentally puncturing my finger with a stapler. Puncturing your finger with a stapler: it seems like a simple enough problem to solve. Just put sanitizer on the hole and wash your hands. The bleeding should stop really quickly, as the holes from staples are small. Simple problem, simple solution, right?

You were wrong. You were very wrong. You were very, very, very wrong. Accidentally stapling your finger isn't treated as a minuscule injury that comes as a result of holding the stapler the wrong way. These days, stapling yourself by mistake is on par with severing a limb. I know because someone saw me do it, and now they think I'm dead. They had an obituary and everything. They even made everyone ditch their Swingline staplers in favour of Boston ones (Boston staplers are crap, by the way), but I kept my Swingline anyway. However; my decision came at a price. Somebody noticed I held onto my Swingline, and they questioned me. They wanted to know why I held onto a "dangerous stapler". I told them to just knock it off. Besides, it's not like I'm dead because of a Swingline. She (I think her name was Jennifer Hughes) told me, "Oh, Anastasia, we don't use that word." "What word?" "Dead. We don't say dead. We say person of metabolic stasis." What. The. Hell. Was. This. Why would it be so unacceptable to say dead? Usually, it's better to say dead rather than hide under a rock pile of euphemisms. I wondered what the insane rationale behind this was. What the rationale actually was made me want to rip my skin off in sheer frustration. I swear, it was so stupid it made me go crosseyed. It was: "Some people don't know that they're dead, and we want to avoid telling them so". See. What did I tell you? Stupid. Painfully stupid.

No, really. It's ridiculous. How can you not know if you're dead? If you're dead, it comes to your attention pretty quickly. All that stuff that makes your body work comes to a grinding halt. You can't see, you can't smell, you sure as hell can't eat, you can't walk, you can't even make a dumb comment about being dead. Your metabolism calls it quits. That is it. How does a person not know when they've died? If you're dead, you can't know. You're beyond knowing. That's the nature of being dead. End of story. Finito. Bye bye.

The stupidity of people is really getting to me. My experiences are so bad that I can't even write them down without them turning into an incoherent collection of paragraphs written for the sake of writing. I'm actually starting to think that I might be hallucinating. I could be hallucinating, and I could not be hallucinating. Regardless, the sheer stupidity of the idea of people not knowing that they're dead makes me wonder if I'm dreaming. People can't be this stupid, right??

Once again, I've been proven wrong. Yesterday, I was listening to a radio talk show, and one of the questions was, "If someone dies in their sleep, should they be informed of their death before they wake up?" Really? That's your question. My question is are you shitting me?? How can people who've died in their sleep know that they've died in the first place? They're dead. It won't do them any good to know that they're dead after they've died, because they can't know that they're dead when they're dead. I seriously cannot believe that one of today's pressing issues is people who've died and don't know it. I literally cannot process what is happening around me. It almost feels like I'm having some weird as hell dream. You know, the kind you get from having some disease that kills you. The kind of fever dream that comes at the point where the disease in question is almost finish killing you. The kind of dream that you get when you're about to die in your sleep.

They say if you die in a dream, you die for real. Sometimes, you don't even know that you've died until someone in your dream mentions that there are people who died and didn't know it. Thus, what I've experienced is pretty close to the kind of dreams you get when you're at the point where you're dying in your sleep from a terminal disease. I died in my sleep and didn't know it

Uh oh.