You guys, I have a confession to make, I've become...a layout junkie! *sob* Seriously, I've been spending more time on FrontPage than is healthy, and as Binje, Sahar and Ahmed can testify, I'm probably going to give myself an aneurysm, and them too.

Though I'm not very good at the HTML'ing, I am quite good at making messes, like with Aniraz's most recent template. I haven't a CLUE why the columns are all crazy, and I'm just so original with creating previously unheard-of HTML problems that no one's been able to solve them yet.

Well, I made my momma a layout, and a new url too. She's now at www.da-momma-blog.blogspot.com. Which I think may be news to her as well.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

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It’s funny how time can change a landscape. Forests become fields, fields become farms, a group of farms becomes a village, a hillside becomes the village graveyard and then the Capital Development Authority comes along and the graveyard is paved over and becomes a road.

I learned a long time ago, actually, that the dead aren’t given much consideration when it comes to property rights. The Chicago Historical society was built over a graveyard, a fact eerily told to me as I sat picnicking in the lush green grass one day. I wouldn’t have known except that had I turned and noticed a small stone building on the premises- a large mausoleum that was on the grounds but not in the way of the building itself. “But they moved all the coffins, right?,” I asked queasily with a bite of sandwich turning dry in my mouth.

No, they didn’t move the coffins. Just the gravestones. It occurred to me that I was sitting on someone’s grave, on the dirt over someone’s face, and we moved the picnic. I remembered that picnic as I was driving through town today, and noticed two small marble platforms in the median in the center of a road. They were graves, not more than thirty years old, and they are all that’s left of the village graveyard that was once here. A man we know from the village across the street has told us that this was once a large graveyard, but the stones were removed, a road was laid on the faces of the dead and the rest of it was divided up into housing plots.

I wonder, when I die, and I am buried in a cemetery, how long will it be before they lay tarmac and cars begin driving over me? How long before my stone is knocked down and my resting place is demeaned with a house or a store- like the strip-mall in front of Rosehill cemetery near my old house in Chicago. That whole area was once a graveyard, now it’s a K-Mart and a Payless shoes.

I’m sure that the whole earth is packed with the bones of the dead, that there isn’t a place anywhere where someone fell and died a long time ago. This whole planet is a giant graveyard. But that’s different. We can’t account for what we don’t know, we can’t respect resting places that we don’t know exist. We can, however, do our best to respect the limits of the graveyards we DO know about. I think we should at least avoid bulldozing them and building houses on top of them.

I don’t care what people say about the city expanding and there being a lack of space. The earth is a big place. It’s not that we’re overcrowded, it’s just that we’re crowding together too densely, and the property values of these graveyards in prime real-estate locations are the real excuses behind these desecrations.

I know this is a weird blog, and I know that it’s morbid and pointless at the same time. But I can’t get over those two lonely graves in the median of the road, turning grey from traffic exhaust. I’m thinking about those graves that are under the road, and it makes me shudder to think of being buried there, not even getting ‘AssalamuAlaikum Ya Ahlal’Quboor’ because no one knows you’re even there. And I think of myself, driving, living, and sitting on the faces of the dead, and I wonder what kind of monumental insult I’m doing to my brothers and sisters who have passed before me.

Astaghfirullah

posted by Abez @ 1/05/2004 09:04:00 PM