I Woke Next to the Corpse by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

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Apathy and “Men of Good Fortune” by Lou Reed; property of the author, the latter under both the

“fair use” and “transformative” doctrines.

In one sense, I took the corpse burying job out of a natural disinterest in and a lack of feeling for meat. I’m sure that if it were deemed acceptable many more would say the same thing.

When I was little I was lousy with full expectations of being a professional baseball player when I grew up, if not sooner. When at age 14-15 I learned that would not be the case, whatever was in second place, if anything, was so far back it wasn’t in the running. This came to a head senior year of high school. It was time to apply to college and assert an intended major. Being not interested in anything, that became a problem.

My mother arranged for me to take a test to establish my interests. They asked questions like; “Would you rather work outside or inside?” and “Do you prefer a rigid or loose

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schedule?” It was duck soup, a test even a gifted dinge could pass, as there was nothing requiring abilities, and perhaps was a forerunner of the predicted, coming standardized testing used to benefit the dumbed down, sagging crew, for want of a better permutation or rearrangement of the letters of a word with a silent G. I answered all the questions. The results confirmed my instinctive guess. I showed no particular interest in anything.

Perhaps with that now being an official “expert” opinion, at first my mother seemed upset that the testers took her money and produced nothing for it. Not much later, she found the situation amusing, as she wasn’t interested in anything, either.

The thought that I might be a pod person has crossed my mind periodically and at that time. I usually dismissed the notion for being just too on the beam. The pod people are either a race of drifting extraterrestrial parasites who left a dying planet or like the clandestine Khazars, they’re the surviving remnants of an earth based race considered extinct and unremembered.

In the case of the former, realizing that their parasitism has brought their planet's life sustaining resources are nearing depletion, the pods evolved the ability to defy gravity and left their planet's atmosphere in the search of other planets to colonize. For ages, the pods floated in space like dormant spores of a virus, and inhabited unsuspecting planets. Upon

I Woke Next to the Corpse