Oh, Bits.

For a while, when I was younger, I would read the obituary page of The Philadelphia Inquirer. When I remarked to a camp counselor that I did this, he asked me why. "To make sure I'm not in there," I quipped.

Precocious, indeed.

Really, the reason I read the obituaries was to see if anybody I knew was in there. I'm not quite sure who exactly I thought I might know, as a fourth grader in suburban southeast Pennsylvania, who might be recently deceased and, therefore, would be in the obituaries. But, for a good few years, I read the obituaries-- just to make sure. I read them pretty regularly. Like other developmentally dubious, potentially unhealthy habits in which I engaged as a child, my parents did little to curb this particular... interest.

"Why don't you read the comics?" my mother helpfully suggested one morning as I sat in my father's chair at the dining room table, hunched over the obits page. I thought about that idea for a moment or two, and it seemed reasonable.

"Okay," I responded. And I began to read the comics, after finishing up reading the obituaries. My favorite comics as a child were "Bloom County" and "Doonesbury."

There is no denying that death is fascinating, especially to a child, who is just beginning to fit death into his whole schema of how the world operates. The utter finality of it, the universality of it, the why and wherefore-- it was pretty arresting for little bowl-cut ol' me. I enjoyed very much reading all the different names and professions people had, how long they lived, where they were being buried. Goldsteins was a very popular funeral home in my neck of the woods, and, as the years went on, several members of my mother's family passed through that way. Those who worshipped in a different way frequently were tended to by the Donahue folks. They had multiple locations. Death is a big business.

The one thing that really irked the piss out of me as a kid reading obituaries was the distinct lack of gory details-- especially when the decedent was a young buck. Like-- I really wanted to know what happened and I thought, if they were going to bother putting this shit in the newspaper, which is supposed to provide information, that I had kind of a right to know how these people died. I wasn't particularly interested in, "passed suddenly." Well, if you're not wasting away in some Stryker bed in your living room with bedsores all over your ass or hooked up to a ventilator in some ICU, isn't it pretty much always "sudden"? Come on, bitches-- I wanted the details.

What? Was she shot? Stabbed? Hammered or what? Did he eat poorly washed baby lettuce with E-coli in it? Was it an aneurysm or an embolism or a tension pneumothorax or a cerebrovascular hemorrhage? Did some crazy fuck put a pillow over this creep's face because he owed him $30 and a Sega Genesis game? I realized, of course, that it was just a tiny obituary and not a coroner's report, but I was reasonably sure that maybe seven or eight words about the cause of death wouldn't kill anybody.

See what I did there?

I routinely scanned the obituary pages to see if people were around the same age my parents were back then. If I read the entire day's worth of death notices, and there were no people who had died at roughly the age my parents were at this time, I could go to school relatively comforted that one or both of them weren't going to drop dead while I was not learning math. This was the kind of reassurance I craved, amongst lots of other kinds. If I read the obituaries and there were a couple of people who kicked it in their late thirties to early forties, it would be a challenging day at school. I wouldn't be able to focus. It's not that I'd be thinking about my parents dying all day, but, at inopportune moments, my mind would admittedly drift back to that unfortunate subject. Well, I'd reason, if it could happen to Stella V. D'Orisio (née Kaplan), then it could just as easily happen to my mommy. I'd like to entirely blame my mediocre grades on this preoccupation of mine, but I don't think that would be entirely fair. I also watched a lot of Monty Python.

Of course, as a child, I never found anybody I knew in the newspaper's obituary section. It was only after I actually started knowing people who had died that I stopped reading the obituaries. Maybe it became too real at that point. My great-uncle. My neighbor. My allergist. The girl I knew from school who died of a heart attack while getting her wisdom teeth out.

Suddenly.

And it was perhaps then that I realized why, when someone so young passes, the family doesn't particularly feel compelled to reveal the reason behind the premature exit from the stage of life. Because it's just too painful. And, really, in the end-- what does it matter? When you're dead, you're dead. And to you and your loved ones, it's a calamity of unequaled proportions. And to some kid with a funny haircut sitting in a turquoise sweatsuit with his legs folded underneath him in his father's chair poring over the newspaper-- it's merely a curious obsession.

To put it mildly.

Noted Author & Recluse

When J. D. Salinger died, I realized that I didn't want to be a famous writer anymore.

When I read the article written about him in the local papers, an unfortunate mirror of other articles written about him in other not-so-local papers, all I could do was shake my head. Even at the headline.

"Salinger: Noted Author & Recluse Dies at 91"

Noted author. And recluse.

Why?

I suppose it isn't enough that he wrote one of the best-selling, most-beloved books of all times-- thumbed through by hundreds of thousands of middle and high schoolers for decades. Because he shunned the spotlight, he had to be "noted author & recluse." Because we didn't see him on "Entertainment Tonight" and on television endorsing Acme Brand Puppy Chow-- because he didn't choose to bust his ass and sell his soul giving corny-ass lectures at universities and book readings in front of the salivating masses across the country, we slap that label right on his dead, wrinkly ass.

"Recluse."

Oh, and then there was the part in the article where is daughter talks about him drinking his own urine. Well, really-- what literary genius isn't a little bit eccentric? I mean, Augusten Burroughs has a dog named "The Cow."

It was a thoroughly disappointing obiturary as obituaries go. It was split into two decidedly unequal parts-- the one about him being a tremendous writer of irrevocable influence on youth and the 20th century, and the one about him shutting himself away from the world in his little hamlet in New Hampshire.

Sipping blithely on his own pee-pee, apparently.

My guess is that, if J. D. Salinger had died thirty or forty years ago, his obituary would have read very differently. The press wasn't as salacious, we the public didn't have such a voracious, insatiable appetite for slander and filth and pornography, literal or figurative. The man would have been lauded as a literary great, a master of the pen, and maybe the sentence, "He was content to live his life apart from everyday society in his small home in New Hampshire."

And that probably would have been that.

I just don't understand what the point is in becoming a great, vaunted genius if, after you die, they're going to make you into some kind of perverted degenerate, as if he ate a constant diet of blue food coloring so he could throw up on himself every morning and shout, "THE FLOOD OF BLUEBERRIES IS UPON US!" into a megaphone to wake up the entire neighborhood. I mean, Jesus-- all the guy wanted was a little privacy from a socially retarded world-- the world that invented "Throw Mama From the Train," college football, "American Idol," the made-for-TV miniseries, sweaters for dogs, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Can you blame the bastard?

If you took some time to think very seriously about the world in which we live and function, trust me, son-- you'd go running for New Hampshire to some basement where you could sit, shivering, with a wool blanket over your head.

Maybe Salinger was trying to escape the ridiculous convention of the media. Well, it was abundantly clear that, after his death, it found him just the same.

They say that denying people something just makes them want whatever it is even more. This is probably true-- take a look at children. Tell them over and over and over that they can't touch the stove and watch how many of them wind up with coil ring-shaped imprints branded to their palms and the words "General Electric" on their faces. Salinger denied the world his presence, and his comments on day to day happenings, something that a megalomaniac like Mark Twain could never have permitted. Even when he was too sick and tired to walk, he summoned newspaper reporters to his bedside so they could record his daily dose of witticism. But Salinger didn't want that. And people sought it out anyway.

People like my high school writing teacher.

I think he was of Polish descent-- his last name was thoroughly unpronouncable, ending in wicz or some combination of those letters-- so we called him "Mr. O." Mr. O was a peculiar fellow, wearing his eyeglasses down on the very tip of his nose, with the lenses tilted down and almost pointed directly at the floor, so that the frames were almost always falling off his face. Somehow they never did, leaving me to suspect that Velcro was somehow involved. Mr. O had legendary pit stains and an bodily odor that bordered on the post-mortem. His hair resembled a graying birds nest, haphazard and sticking up in places and his moustache bore specks of food and tiny shavings of wood, presumably because he enjoyed gnawing on pencils.

I don't remember much of what Mr. O taught us, but I do remember a few anecdotes. He told us that, for one year, he stopped speaking-- to anybody. I remember a fellow classmate of mine asking if it was for any sort of religious reason. Mr. O replied no, that he just wanted to see if he could do it, and that he realized he didn't have very much to say to anybody.

I also distinctly remember him telling us (I don't remember, though, how it came up) of his unquenchable love for popcorn.

"If there was a bag of popcorn sitting right on the edge of a cliff, and my wife was also hanging off the edge of that same cliff," he told us one day, "I'd go for the bag of popcorn."

The only other thing I remember about Mr. O was him telling us about the time that he stalked his favorite writer, J. D. Salinger. Somehow he'd found out Salinger's address (these things were a lot harder to do in the 1970s) and he drove up to the town where Salinger lived. He stocked up on tinned tuna and chicken and other necessities, purchased camouflage facepaint, covered himself in it, and hid in Salinger's bushes.

For a week.

Finally, Mr. O told us, he couldn't take it anymore, and he summoned up the nerve to walk up the path and ring the bell of J. D. Salinger's house.

"I couldn't believe that I was about to meet my hero, J. D. Salinger," Mr. O told us. "I crept up the walk, slowly, slowly, and I stood in front of his door for at least ten minutes. And then, finally, my finger reached shakily for that little circle button on the side of his door and, I don't know how I got the nerve to do it, but I pushed it."

"What happened then?" someone in the back of the room asked. Mr. O looked at the kid as if he'd asked a very stupid question. He gave his answer in a manner that would suggest that we all should have been able to predict the outcome of this tale.

"I ran away."

With Every Welcome Comes a Fare-thee-Well

As I warmly welcome you to My Masonic Apron, I bid a fond farewell to P'H N.

He was a close, trusted and dear friend to us all, and to me, although I admit that he sometimes got on my nerves. I know he will be missed in many various ways, but his spirit will live on at My Masonic Apron. For those of you who missed it in The Philadelphia Gay News and the London Telegraph, here is a copy of P'H N'ss obituary:

"P'H N, a resident of Blogspot.com, died today at the age of 8 months, 336 posts. He suffered from a massive case of indigestion coupled with the concurrent complications of traumatic vaginal dissection, renal insufficieny, rheumatic bolero, and a piano being dropped on his head.

While rescue personnel from several agencies responded to the scene of the incidents and tried to revive him, P'H N expired in the arms of a novice EMT who was attempting to affix an oxygen mask to his left ear. Before he passed, P'H N was overheard saying,

"That goes around my nose and mouth, you fucking retard."

P'H N leaves behind scores of random, pimply, skeevy Googlers as well as 14 dedicated followers who, for some reason, hung on his every word as if it were a missive from the Messiah or at the very least, Jim Cramer of CNBC's "Mad Money."

In lieu of flowers, which are always left in the vase far too long until they end up smelling like the carcass of the hamster that escaped from its cage when you were a boy and you found seventeen years later, rotting away in the basement, donations may be made to The United Society of Bloggers Who Have Had to Abandon Their Blogs and Create New Ones for Some Unknown Reason. Donations may also be made to Victoria's Secret, which was P'H N's favorite shop. Well, catalogue."

So, as we raise a glass of whatever's laying around in the fridge to P'H N, I urge you to join me in forgetting about the freeloading bastard as quickly as possible and, in turning your back on him, make My Masonic Apron your new drug-of-choice.

You won't regret it.