Showing posts with label The Big Lebowski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Big Lebowski. Show all posts

Saturday, August 31, 2013

"I don’t care who you are; it’s not right to put a human person’s ashes in a Wal-Mart bag."

When you get cremated remains, they're in a plastic bag inside whatever outer container you ordered — perhaps the standard cardboard box, perhaps some urn that you imagined was what urns are supposed to look like. How you feel when you receive that package will depend on a lot of things, but seeing the plastic bag — especially if you chose the ancient-bronze-looking Vessel of Somber Respect — is probably going to hurt. So then what if you pull the bag out and see that it's the cut off bottom of a bag that you recognize as a Wal-Mart bag?

If you're this lady in Ohio, you call the local TV station and let them put you in front of a camera to enact your grief. And you name the funeral home on television and to the Kentucky attorney general’s office and the Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors. The woman's ex-husband, father of the 17-year-old boy who died of a heart condition, also appears on camera, just to say what the funeral home did was "not malicious."

What if your family member had died, and you discovered the ground-up bones they gave you — they aren't really "ashes" — are in a Wal-Mart bag? Fragile souls should close that container back up and forget about it. Cover memories of the bag with memories of the dead person. Look at your best photographs. Remember life.

For less fragile souls: Find the humor. A remark about the value of recycling or what the dead one thought of Wal-Mart — for example: "He was always trying to get me to shop at Wal-Mart and I said I wanted a more posh shopping experience, and now, I can hear him laughing at me for wanting a more posh urn experience. Laughing at me from the grave. I mean from the goddamned Wal-Mart bag. No, not damned. He's not damned. He's gone to the Big Box Store in the Sky."

ADDED: Inevitable movie reference:

Friday, March 8, 2013

"Loosely based on Taoism, Dudeism aims to produce self-reliance and improve self-regard..."

"... so the congregational aspect of it isn't strongly emphasized anyway."
"The looser we keep it, the more 'Dude' it seems to be," Benjamin wrote. That may all change, though, when the Dudeist Social Network, a social media platform that will be pretty much exactly what it sounds like, goes live. "It'll be easier to disorganize some events without working too hard," he joked.
Benjamin is Oliver Benjamin, founder of the Church of the Latter-Day Dude and co-author of "The Abide Guide: Living Like Lebowski."

If you had to invent a religion based on a movie, what movie would you choose?