Morbid Monday 3: This Time in Western Haiku

A Haiku or two
I'll provide for all right here
on Morbid Monday

I have to admit
Death by sparkling vampire
would pretty much suck

Moonlit dining plans
are surely not the choice when
with a loup garou

Drowning in the depths
with or without nude mermaids
It is still all wet

Fair weather or foul
Being devoured alive
really truly bites

Morbid Monday 2: Getting Gorey

Rather than discuss death by Jell-o (which might be my topic for next Monday). Let's talk about some truly morbid fun...

Which means we have to talk, just for a moment, about Siobhan Magnus. (Don't worry, this is not a post about American Idol). I enjoyed her rendition of "Paint It Black", but none of her other performances ever really worked for me. What I do find interesting is her style, her presence, but most of all... the tattoo on her upper arm. I thought it was a Mary Poppins tattoo.

It's not.

Vote The Worst has a great image of the tattoo next to the artwork upon which it is based.

That's the cover to Edward Gorey's abecedarian work The Gashleycrumb Tinies. Yes, he's the "Gorey" from the title of this blog post. If I get nothing out of American Idol this year other than the an introduction to this man's absurd yet morbid literary works and art, it will have been well worth the time spent. How can you not love a book which includes lines like:

"A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.

B is for Basil assaulted by bears.

C is for Clara who wasted away.

D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh..."

I haven't read much of Gorey's work yet, but I'm going to be looking into it. And I can't help but think of Greta holding a copy of The Gashleycrumb Tinies alongside her copy of Neil Gaiman's The Dangerous Alphabet, and of course, AlphaOops: H is for Halloween by Alethea Kontis. I picture her curled up in Fang's trunk with all three volumes (physical copies, though I suppose she could have them on a iPad) cuddling her favorite pet skull (more on that when CROSSED comes out in 2011) and reading the books aloud to it while showing Telly (that's the skull) all the pictures. What fun!

:)

Morbid Monday 1: Death by Clown Car

We've all seen one either in an actual circus, a cartoon... or at the very least heard of one. Picture a small car, often made up to resemble a VW Beetle (if not an actual VW Beetle) and out of it climb clown after clown. That's right, I'm talking about that well-known and highly feared implement of death... THE CLOWN CAR.

I can think of a worse way to go, but even so, death by clown car has to rank very high on the most embarrassing ways to die list. Sure if you died being run over by a clown car it could be a rather pedestrian death (Bad pun intentional), but what if it were worse than that? What if, heaven forbid, it was a death that needed EXPLAINING?

Imagine the proverbial line in front of the pearly gates where one finds himself or herself shunted off into the Questionable Death Queue where instead of St. Peter, he or she has to face some unnamed holdover from the old testament who looks at them with a funny look and asks, "What exactly were you doing underneath all those clowns in the backseat?"

I don't see how a person could recover from that. Even the serial killers would laugh. Okay, well everyone would laugh. Perhaps I should say especially the serial killers would laugh except for the one in the back kicking himself for not having thought of that execution method himself.

Either way, I don't think the Questionable Death Queue man would go for it.

"We don't take your kind here," the man with the bushy white eyebrows might say and whoosh off to hell with the other deviants clown fetishists. It really doesn't bear thinking about. Come to think of it, it isn't really all that much better if one tripped on the way out of the clown car having survived the clown on clown sardine action only trip and impale oneself on a monkey. The little man from the Questionable Deaths Queue is even more likely to raise an eyebrow and deliver a GO TO HELL verdict before the poor soul in question can manage a "But wait! When I say impaled myself on a monkey I didn't mean it like THAT..."

Call me crazy, but Death by Clown Car? I'd avoid it. Wouldn't you?

P.S. I know this blog is going up a little late, but as the song goes:

Some blog in the morning
Some blog late at night
Other choose the afternoon...
It's afternoon delight.

(Or something like that, You know. Maybe there isn't even a song at all. Oh well.)

;)