“But don’t pity the dead. They have time on their mouldering hands, and all they do is think of ways to vex us. They watch we living go about our dirty business—lying and cheating; penis-pumping; pirating pop music—and smile, amused, cool, indifferent, they’re like high-functioning heroin addicts, or cats. You want to get their attention, make them notice, shine a laser pointer on the ground and watch them scramble out of their graves. But that wouldn’t work, because nothing, no matter how you try, gets the dead’s goat. They’re the natives. We’re the tourists.”

-Paul Ford, “Just Like Heaven.” The Morning News. January 6, 2010.

I don’t know what exactly it is about this piece about whether there is an afterlife that works for me, but it may very well be all of it. Weird and lovely. I too wonder why I haven’t been uploaded into some kind of forever hell described by Iain M. Banks yet. But, there’s still hope!