Being dead is not so bad – said no dead person ever!
Death is unpleasant to experience and its aftermath has a catastrophic impact on your social life. I should know – I have been dead for years, ever since my MURDER by THE NOTORIOUS CAD* Leslie Richmond.
Leslie knows what he did and he has never apologised.
His murder weapon? A facebook quiz from the late 2000s.
We were in a duel to the death. The cad had offended my honour in some Facebook comment in a manner I’ve long forgotten. Such concerns fade away once you’ve passed over to the Other Side.
As a Gentleman, I immediately demanded satisfaction. Challenging the cad to a duel to the death, I insisted he choose his weapon. Without hesitating, the cad chose aging, commenting that he’d “seen the state of my liver” and was quite confident.
It was a bold statement. My liver had survived horrors inflicted on it that would fell the Greatest Monsters from the Myths of All Ages. It was bound to out-live some beret-wearing bastard from Adelaide.
It never got the chance.
It was early 2009 when I took the Facebook quiz “When Will You Die?” Such quizzes were all the rage in Facebook’s early days; a more innocent time when “mass data harvesting” was not a widely understood concept.
I received the shocking answer: October 21, 2008. I had been dead for several months!
It actually made a lot of sense. My hangovers had been getting drastically worse.
You might wonder why I didn’t challenge the quiz’s result. But at the time, I was in the habit of repeating loudly every time I did such a quiz that “Facebook does not lie!” Such was my first response to its terrible findings.
It was only when Leslie gleefully popped up to declare victory in the duel that the true significance of the moment dawned on me. I had lost a duel to a cad in Adelaide.
Having declared my faith in the quiz result, I could hardly now admit I was wrong. As anyone could tell you, admitting you are wrong on social media is a fate distinctly worse than death.
I had to accept defeat. I had been murdered by a cad.
Now some may wish to play the “devil’s advocate” and equivocate over the claim of murder.
Surely, I can hear these apologists declare, it was the Facebook quiz rather than Leslie Richmond who consigned me to the After Life.
Leslie merely got lucky, this “theory” goes, skating through to victory as the Steven Bradbury of duellists.
BUT WHO DO YOU THINK CREATED THAT FACEBOOK QUIZ?
Oh he’s covered his tracks. You’ll find no smoking gun or clear cyber trail leading back to his blood-stained hands. But the explanation I somehow just happened to stumble onto the quiz that ended my life – and delivered the cad his greatest victory – is far too convenient.
I would go further and suggest that Leslie Richmond may not just be responsible for that quiz but for Facebook itself – a crime almost as terrible for humanity as murdering me!
I would not be surprised if Mark Zuckerburg turned out to really be Leslie Richmond in a latex mask, and that the cad secretly enrolled in Havard in the mid-2000s as part of a long game to entrap me.
Provoking me with his relentless slights on my honour on the very site he developed for its ease of trading public insults, he knew it was just a matter of time before I would say NO MORE and insist on a duel to the death.
And then he struck!
This is the only believable explanation for the series of events that led to my current status of deceased.
It is not easy being dead. The world is almost entirely set up to serve the living. There is very little advice available for navigating life once you've formally departed it – with the honourable exception of America’s Greatest Living Philosopher who once wisely sung “Never drive a car when you’re dead”.
Wise words, Tom Waits. I never do. Not even with the current state of Sydney’s trains.
'Never trust a man in blue trench coat, never drive a car when your dead...'
* A cad, for those born after 1830, is "a man who behaves dishonourably" -- a complete bounder, in other words.
