Friends, Romans, Darling Ones, lend me your ears,

It is 6:01 p.m. on Monday the 28th of June as I type this. I’ve already eaten dinner. To be perfectly honest, I ate dinner four Hi-Chews, a quicky work assignment, and one spin of “Bastards of Young” ago.

Now that I have my grave sorted out now I gotta eat dinner around the five o’clock hour and go to bed at 8:30.

You read that right, I got a place where the good can be interred with my bones. Or at least the dust of my bones that remains after I am cremated. It feels so very responsible and grown-up to have that afterlife resting place sorted out, doesn’t it? I can take zero percent of the credit for that. It’s all Sister #2’s doing. One of her goals for her visit to MN was getting her and Ben’s grave sorted out. They had some special requests, but it turns out when you have a family cemetery you can do what you want. Now the whole lot of us are gonna be buried together in the corner under some trees (pictured above).

We’re still working out the details of the headstone, but I’m 99.9% sure it will include the phrase “Rock Hard & Ride Free.” This was the senior quote (minus the ampersand, I believe) Wolfdogg used in his high school yearbook and which all of Rock & Roll Bookclub has adopted as a personal motto.

Did you know we have a family cemetery? It’s in Savage off of McColl Drive. My cousin Alan was buried there when he died at age nineteen in the mid-90s.

Despite having experienced the deaths of people of all ages — teenage cousins, babies, college-aged friends, grandparents, and aunts & uncles — I still feel a little bit like I’m putting the cart before the horse on this whole grave thing. My brain keeps saying, woah there, missy, you aren’t that old. Slow your roll. A part of me is not ready to face my own mortality. A different part of me is convinced now that I have a place to go when I die I’m going to drop dead randomly any minute now.

Aging is fun!

Speaking of, I went to the eye doctor today for the first time in like a decade. Ye olde peepers aren’t as sharp as they used to be and I was pretty sure I needed bi-focals. I am forty-nine after all and it seems all my friends got them a couple years ago. I was ready to cross this one off the aging list.

Even though I only see my eye doctor every ten years, I adore him. He’s a petite, handsome Filipino man who cracks me up. He shuddered when I told him I spend eightish hours a day on the computer and then fake wept when I told him I had read eighty-nine books so far this year.

“Your poor eyes,” he said. Then we talked about what books I had been reading, and he complimented me on my varied taste. I had to resist the urge to put him in my pocket and take him home.

He wasn’t at all surprised when I said I was forty-nine and probably needed bi-focals. He’s the same age and said he had been using bi-focals since he turned forty. This surprised the fuck out of me because that dude does not look more than thirty-five. I should have asked him about his skincare regime rather than discussing paper books vs ebooks.

Anyway, turns out this ol’ spinster doesn’t need bi-focals yet. He said I could get them if I wanted, but the difference was so slight I might not even notice it. He suggested I just take my glasses off when reading.

Not entirely ready for the grave yet,
Jodi