Packing For The Afterlife

I’ll be getting on a plane this week, which has me thinking about the afterlife. Transportation experts say that flying is safer than any other form of travel. But they only consider things like aircraft maintenance, pilot training, and crash statistics. They don’t factor in certain other dangerous things, like other passengers.

So I might die in a prison-style riot on the tarmac after ten hours of delay. Or some guy with leg-space issues might choke me with a bag of pretzels. Which I’m okay with. Because my theory of the afterlife holds that when you die you enter another world that exactly fits your deepest interest and desires.

So, if you’re an ardent environmentalist, you’ll emerge into a world of perfect, untouched nature. There’s no clear cuts and pollution. No mansions in Aspen owned by CEOs whose companies befoul places they’d never live in. Little birds chirp with abandon. You’ll see someone kneeling by a stream and you’ll shout “Holy crap, he’s drinking from a river! No purification pump!

If you’re a person who gets pissed at laws restricting you to buying one gun per month, you’ll enter a world full of fear and mistrust where everyone’s packing. Everyone believes that anyone who doesn’t look or think like themselves is a total threat. It’s tense and grim, but totally exciting.

And if you’re like me you’ll emerge into a world where 80’s music is playing. People everywhere are dancing and air-guitaring. The white guys are dancing awkwardly but giving it their best, their faces pressed into white-man overbites. And everyone is wearing a t-shirt with something like this on the front:

So I’m packing my stupidest muscle-tee, just in case: