Yeah, yeah, I haven't written to
y'all in a while, but I gots a good escuse. I bin dead. C'est
true. Y'see a friend of mine needed someone to fly him to the
Caribbean, and as the person with the most flying experience, I
was picked upon. (I had equal experience at flying with everyone
else within my cult, but I was the first alphabetically, so I had
to do the flying). The take-off, flight and landing were
uneventful, and I acquitted myself with panache - well, I
wouldn't have it any other way, would I? He went to do whatever
it was he came to do and I stayed on the plane, as is the pilot's
duty, apparently. It blew up. I died. Luckily it was a seaplane,
and hence parked way out to sea, or innocent civilians might have
died. I knew the risk I was getting into when I was elected to
the role of pilot; I knew pilots always die, and it's always
their own damn fault. Anyway, I wasn't in too much pain,
so I just went with the flow and lived life with Max.
The time between dying and
reincarnation is known in the business as the Scout Days, and the
way in which you wander round is known as the Scout Daze; it's a
homonym that has no humourous fallout, and hence is not referred
to as a pun. Rumours abound, as only rumours and superheroes
cased in india rubber can, as to the origin of the scout in the
days and daze. The first option is that a new body for your soul
is being scouted out. It's a nice idea, almost quaint, but for
reasons which I choose not to go into here, completely offensive
and wrong. Next up is the idea put forward by a pencil of obtuse
provenance that the mannerisms one adopts between death and
relife are akin to those of Scout in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's
Nest. A more acute pencil suggested that pencil A had made a
mistake, and meant instead To Kill A Mockingbird; a fight ensued
and that idea was never mentioned again. The Most Likely Option,
and my personal favourite, is that one is forced by big burly men
in tight leather shorts to wear a sort of greenish uniform that
varies from country to country, and to tie knots.
I had never gotten round to
contemplating reincarnation. Cartesian Dualism (the dichotomy of
mind and body), however never rang true to me. Oh sure, I'm an
existentialist with the best of them, but Descartes always came
across to me as a bit of a tit. You make your own afterlife,
apparently. Whatever you believe happens. That's the way it
works, apparently. Who would have thunk it? I always
presumed that when you die, you die, game over, and all that shit
Bearing all these facts in mind, you woulda thought I wouldn't be
here to type to you now, right? Wrong. My forgetfulness in
contemplating reincarnation left a loophole in the system; I was
to be reincarnated. This was in direct conflict with my assertion
that Descartes sucked: if my soul/mind was to be reincarnated,
then my body would have to be involved too, somehow. Crisis talks
were held, with much nodding of brows, and shaking of chocolates.
A compromise was reached: I was to return to life intact, with
the inclusion of the soul of a particularly chaste and beautiful
koala. No-one was particularly happy with the outcome, least of
all the koala, but we all accepted that, holistically speaking,
it was for the best.
So that's where I've been.
Accept my apologies for my part in this, although I am guiltless.
You are guileless too, and so is the koala. Let's all just get on
with enjoying life while we can, eh?