Another Weird Day

It was probably finding the dead body on the beach that really made Monday weird for me, but I’ll get to that later. Monday was a federal holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Interestingly, it was also a state holiday in Alabama and Mississippi to “honor” the traitor and Confederate General Robert E. Lee. They call it King-Lee Day in those states. It’s so nice that they link MLK with slavery.

Anyway, I decided that business would be lighter than a normal Monday, so I took most of the day off to address some clinical trial study business in Chicago. My first appointment was for, uh, well, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t remember. Oddly enough, I went anyway. They seemed to know me when we spoke on the phone and confirmed the appointment. However, when I got there, it sure didn’t look familiar to me other than it was on Chicago’s beautiful Michigan Avenue. But still I continued unknowingly on to the appointment in a small, nondescript, sixth floor office. It wasn’t until I was sitting in an exam room that I realized what the study was for. I was grateful that it wasn’t for an experimental lobotomy. I read the release form and remembered I was there for an Alzheimer’s study.

I’m guessing I don’t have to point out the irony. I also wonder if I really qualify. You’ve read this blog. Can you really say that I don’t have a thinking problem?

In 3 months, I’ll know if they have identified certain tau proteins in my blood that may or may not indicate that I have a propensity toward Alzheimer’s. Or something like that, I forget.

I had some time before my next appointment, so I thought a winter walk on the beach would be a good idea. Boy, was I wrong. Sure, I enjoyed the walk – until I stumbled upon this dead body.

That, dear readers, is a box full of a cremated body in a plastic bag or a bag of dirty cocaine disguised as someone’s ashes. I blocked out the somewhat unusual name of the deceased. I don’t want any of his survivors getting in trouble for dumping his cremains in Lake Michigan. I did a quick internet search while on the beach to check on an obituary. Nothing. If I had found some relatives of the deceased through an obituary, I would have considered returning the cremains to them. Hopefully, they wouldn’t dump the whole shebang in the lake again. Open the bag. Dump the ashes. That’s how it is supposed to work. And I certainly did not have the time to drop them off at a police station and try to explain why I was walking around with a dead guy’s ashes. So, I heaved him back into Lake Michigan with the hope that an ebb tide would take him back out to the depths of the lake from whence he came.

I did more internet research when I got home to try and find out more about the deceased. Absolutely nothing. He’s a mystery man. But it got me thinking that I don’t want to put the burden of disposing of my ashes on anyone. Too many things can go wrong.