The First Song Popping Up on Your iPod Which Makes You Weep During the Long Drive Home from the Funeral:
Don't Bother, They're Here by
Stars of the Lid, due to its tender ethereal weight. A vast soundtrack to the cosmos, it makes you reflect on loss and grasping the infinite, asking yourself what the fuck it's really all about.
The Second Song Popping Up on Your iPod Which Makes You Weep During the Long Drive Home from the Funeral:
Song for Bob by
Nick Cave and
Warren Ellis (from the soundtrack to
The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford), due to its epic sadness, exposing the massive tragic destiny of life, making you ponder what the fuck is beyond living and dying.
The Third Song Popping Up on Your iPod Which Doesn't Make You Weep During the Long Drive Home from the Funeral, but Instead Just Makes You Ask "What the fuck???:
A Feast for Famished Ravens Part 1 by
Xynfonica.
The Kurosawa Flick Which, After Enduring the Death of Your Father, Holds New Resonance and Wisdom, Pointing a Way Towards Understanding and Accepting a Loved One's Illness and Passing:
Red Beard, but only the scenes involving
Yuzo Kayama witnessing elderly patients dying alone, not the scene where
Toshiro Mifune is violently breaking the arms and legs of his attackers outside the brothel (this only occurred, like, just a few times in my youth, and even then only after I'd finished all my homework).
On Death and Dying, Part 1: It's become more common, when one dies in a driving accident, for your loved ones to mark the sight of your roadside death with flowers and mementos in remembrance of your life. I've decided, if I were to be killed while driving, that I'd rather my loved ones not commemorate the spot of my demise with trinkets. Instead, simply block off the road with massive cement barriers, making sure nobody is allowed to traverse on that particular street ever again.
How I Would Like to Die: The makers of
Forrest Gump and
The Puffy Chair (two sides of the same overwrought coin) are pitted against each other in a battle to the death, staged in an enormous outdoor stadium, broadcast worldwide. In my glee over the possibility of both sides getting slaughtered, I find myself slipping from atop my perch in the nosebleed section and rolling down the stairs, smack into the middle of the violent melee. My arch nemesis,
Sarah Jessica Parker, is watching from the sidelines, cheering on my imminent demise. To her surprise (and to my delight), a swarm of alligators are released onto the field, all of whom quickly chomp onto the neck of
Mrs. Matthew Broderick, killing her instantly and diffusing any chances of a sequel to
Sex & the City: The Movie. Meanwhile, all the actors from
The Puffy Chair--along with anyone who enjoyed this tepid turd of a film--are suddenly gobbled up by a pack mob of flesh-eating microbes, leaving the cast and crew of
Gump momentarily victorious. But not for long: a large cache of M-16 missiles are mysteriously thrust into my waiting arms, allowing me to smite everyone remotely connected with this. In my haste to waste these cinematic vermin, I slip on one of
Sarah Jessica Parker's Antique Rose
Prada boots (a slightly amusing irony) and crack my skull open, dying instantly.
On Death and Dying, Park 2: It's quite natural, when envisioning your own future death, to ponder who precisely will be attending your funeral, and if their presence is because of unconditional love or merely out of a sense of duty. One way to guarantee the sincerity of your mourners would be to erect a
Fear Factor-styled obstacle course outside your place of burial. Loved ones must traverse impediments such as acrylic crates of hissing cobras, walking over scalding coals, and so on. Nothing says
"you will be missed" more than gulping down a spoonful of juice squeezed from pig intestines.
Almost three years after the unbearably sad death of Lux Interior, I am now on Stage 6 of the Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Grief: listening to The Cramps Jukebox over and over and over in the vein hope that repeat listens of this 2-CD set will miraculously bring him back to life. Songs on this (authorized?) CD, such as 
Depression is a rarity for me (my life is pretty flippin' great). Probably a handful of sad movies (Nobody Knows, Tokyo Story, A Thousand Clouds Of Peace, Faces, You Can Count On Me, Before Night Falls, The Day I Became A Woman) and sad songs are the two motivators that get my eyes all misty-like. Some of the saddest songs ever written are by the no-longer-with-us Red Red Meat. How sad was this band, you might ask? So much so that they even sounded sad when they covered someone else's song (in this case, Polara's 
A benefit has been scheduled--chock full of a multitude of pop, rock, rap and country acts--with proceeds going to victims of Hurricane Katrina. To name just a few of the many, many stars performing: U2, Alicia Keys, the Foo Fighters, Kanye West, Neil Young and, remarkably, Randy Newman. Hmm. I wonder 
Sandra, you are so right: we do live in such reactionary times. Sadly, not much has changed since this track, 
Ah, Memorial Day. Another pointless exercise in honoring those fighting in a trumped-up war we never should have started in the first place, unless, like White House spokesman Scott McClellan, you believe the US was invited (which also means victims of rape were asking for it). Is the purpose of this war to defend the freedoms of misguided, religion-baiting assholes like this? Because the amount of patriotism I feel today could fit in a thimble, I have decided to offer a track whose lyrics make inadvertent ironic commentary on the current state of the twisted American mind: 
