Archives for posts with tag: death

window seat please

By daniel incandela
July 22, 2010 //
1

(new here? read this first.)

Hi I’m Daniel. Nice to meet you.

I love traveling. I’ve already mentioned it in this post, and this one, and this one. And this blog is still a baby!

I am terribly happy traveling. I am most comfortable in foreign lands. I would visit anywhere. I like weird food, people yelling at me in languages I don’t understand, different currency, new cultures, and the exhaustion that comes from exploring. I’m envious of Anthony Bourdain. I love to travel, and I always request a window seat.

I daydream on planes. I think about life. I don’t talk to the person next to me. I sometimes play video games. I rarely sleep. I listen to music. A lot. But 99% of the time, I’m looking out the window. I guess, I read sometimes, but you get the idea.

I look at clouds. I try to understand what they’re interpreting. Most of the time they just look like Smurfs. Papa Smurf. Handy Smurf. Vanity Smurf. Rarely Smurfette. It passes the time and lets me think.

I listen for the ‘ding’ after take off for the 10,000 feet indication. That’s when I can listen to music. I feel a part of the plane as it glides 6 miles in the air. I look down on the landscape and imagine the life down there. The scenery always reminds me of paintings. I always have my camera in my hand or have it nearby in the gross seat back pouch thing. I snap away the entire flight looking for something that strikes my fancy. People give me weird looks. I don’t mind. I also love that everyone is a stranger when you travel.

Occasionally, you encounter such beauty, that it stops all thinking. You gaze out the window, mouth agape, looking at one of the most beautiful scenes you’ve ever seen. In this moment, with this image, I felt like I was at the Louvre. Not on a United Airlines regional jet from Chicago. I love discovering beauty found in exploring. And I love to travel, with a camera.

(‘window seat please’ is a reference to a Flickr group I joined a couple of years ago – check it out, here)

window seat please

window seat please

Hey, it’s Casey, and when we started this? I had no idea I was going to talking about death so much. Seriously. Death death, death and now death again.

My aunt died this week. Well, her body died but her very much alive spirit went to heaven. Because for people like her? The only way to go is up.

She spent 48 years as a quadripeligic. She’s now spent four days in heaven. With a perfectly restored body, that can do everything her earthly body couldn’t manage. She used to tell me about this dream she constantly had about running behind a pickup truck through a wheat field. I wonder if there are wheat fields in heaven?

I like to think about what she’s doing up there. If she’s just flopping her legs around at the edge of a pool because she can or if she’s attempting Olympic cloud jumps. I wonder if it makes any difference to her at all. She never really much minded that she couldn’t walk while she was here on Earth, I mean, she got to where she needed to go and if she needed anything it could easily be brought to her.

But still, I wonder what heaven is like. I mean, I know it can’t just be people swathed in gauzy robes playing harps all day. And I can promise you it’s an even better place now that my Aunt Cheryl is there. I’m pretty sure she’s the funniest person in Heaven. I guess when I think about heaven it must feel like all those tiny little magical moments that occur day to day just smooshed together into one eternal day.

My aunt would say that she got hurt because she wasn’t listening. So God sat her down and made her listen.

And she spent every day doing just that. And when I think about it? A lot of my “this is what heaven must be like” moments? Happened when I was with her.

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Categories daniel started it.

the millenium falcon

By daniel incandela
July 11, 2010 //
4

(new here? read this first.)

I’m Daniel. And I’m kind of a nerd.

This picture has always reminded me of the Millenium Falcon. Like a lot of kids my age, Star Wars played a big role in my upbringing. I can still see Han Solo and Chewbacca engaging hyper drive. That’s what this image means to me – 6 years old, watching in complete wonderment as I discovered space, robots, the force, Princess Leia and bounty hunters. It’s a miracle I didn’t break the VCR back in those days.

I’ve had plenty of time to process the first three Star Wars films (I refuse to discuss the new one’s). I do a mean Chewy impression. I’m known to slip in a “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” during conversations, and I attend Gen Con annually, there’s more…I honestly think R2-D2 could beat a T-Rex in a fight. It pains me that C-3PO is so insecure. I really don’t get it. He’s shiny, gold and can communicate in over 6 million forms of communication. What’s the problem?

Let’s just say I reference Star Wars a lot.

A few years ago, I bought two orange trees. I named them R2-D2 and C-3PO. I still have R2. Unfortunately, Threepio died. I’ve killed a lot of plants. I ordered a new orange tree earlier this year and considered the name for some time.

I’m thrilled to say that Boba Fett the Orange Tree is flourishing. I keep him on the balcony, usually by himself (bounty hunter style). The Boba Fett character was probably the coolest in all of the Star Wars films. Amazing armor, quiet, traveled frequently, made his own hours, AND, a rocket back pack. What a life.

He died a ridiculous and unflattering death in The Empire Strikes Back – it’s almost like someone played a prank on him. It still really irritates me today. But I’m coping.

All I can do now, is make sure that when Boba Fett the Orange Tree dies, it happens with a little more dignity.

4th of July

how casey sees it…

I once had a stepdad who was a mortician. I could say funeral director, but for the sake of this story he was a mortician, he did mortician stuff, he just happened to direct funerals as well.

I learned a lot a lot from him over the years, such as certain chemicals used on someone who had died from an overdose would cause them to turn Kermit the Frog green. When reconstructing a face for a viewing glass marbles are used where eyeballs used to be. A dead body left in a hot car for weeks will turn black and bloat. There are certain religions that approach death differently, and the feelings towards it are palpable among the different sects.

But there is one story he told me about a teenage girl riding down a narrow two lane canyon in the back of a friends car. They had been drinking and she had stuck her head out the car window for whatever reason teenagers stick their heads out of car windows. They came around a bend at the same time as a truck traveling in the opposite direction.

It hit her.

It tore her in half.

Many times my friends and I had been that girl, hanging out car windows while riding down steep and curvy canyons. Sometimes I was drunk, sometimes I was not. But from the moment I heard that story I was changed. I could visualize it too easily. The breeze in her face, the curve in the canyon, the headlights, the honking, that sound, the screaming…

…the phone call to her parents.

Even 13 years later I still tense up driving down winding canyon roads, especially at night.

I’m not sure if it was his intention to scare me with this story, but it worked. And while I still lived the rest of my teenage years with fairly reckless abandon, I also lived with a new fear, the fear of death.

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Categories daniel started it.

sandwiched.

By casey mullins
July 2, 2010 //
4

(new here? read this first.)

casey’s first.

There was a time that I didn’t know what death looked like first hand, I didn’t have to worry about another’s ulterior motives and I didn’t have to think about a single food I put into my mouth (aside from kiwis and avocados…I’ve always known they make my mouth itchy but never really cared.) There was a time I looked forward to every day.

There was a time when a picture was just a snapshot I took of my best friend eating a sandwich in the Neiman Marcus cafe in Union Square at the beginning of our first ever weekend weekend away together. Now it’s a memory of a better time. A time when both of us didn’t know about death first hand. A time when neither of us knew about the awful in the world. A moment where our friendship, and we individually, were invincible.

And oddly enough, both able to eat gluten.

Daniel’s take

What’s the deal with focaccia bread?

It’s fancy. It’s different. It’s hard to spell.

You get it at foux foux cafes. I like it. Not sure I trust it.

It adds at least $4 to a sandwich.

It leaves a slight oily residue on your fingers.

Sometimes, it crumbles in your lap and leaves a stuff on your pants.

That’s what focaccia is capable of doing.

It’s great in a food fight, though.

A baguette is solid. A roll will suffice. Giant pretzels, rye loaves, bread sticks, slices and a boule aren’t bad. But they’re no focaccia.

Focaccia flies through the air with grace, with sophistication and panache. It allows for precision.

It may lack the impact of a hardened baguette, but it makes up for it with the penetration of olive oil or rosemary residue.  And you get to yell, “You got focaccia-d”.

The next time you’re at a fancy café, family reunion, boring lunch or job interview, order the focaccia and see what happens. You’ll earn instant respect.

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Categories casey started it.
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