The Things We Carry

I was sitting on the toilet the other day when it struck me.
Like a deer darting in front of a Sunday driver, both trotting along innocently, oblivious to the other until the fatal moment of impact, it crammed its horns into my cranium, and now I cannot escape it. Every time I close my eyes it is there, waiting to confront me:

What if I was mysteriously murdered and the only clues available to investigators regarding a possible motive and my very existence were the contents of my wallet?

I know….

What artifacts am I leaving behind for others to piece together in order to recreate the complex mosaic that is my life? Do I even like or recognize the message I am leaving?

This scenario ever crossed your mind? As I believe the vast majority of people to live unexamined lives, I am guessing not. You probably go throughout your day unmindful of the unexpected, the anonymous sink hole waiting to suck you in or the madman in the bushes, silently stalking before he leaps into the night, restrains you with his rope, and then uses his team of horses to draw and quarter you as your hollow screams escape into the musty air.

Never thought about it, huh?

Well, it could happen. And when it does, what emblem will you be remembered by? An expired condom buried deep in the pockets of your billfold, ribbed for her pleasure? A crusty McDonald’s napkin you licked three weeks ago and then rubbed on your son’s dirty cheek, now cemented to the lining of your purse? Are these the things you want marking your legacy?

As I sat there on the toilet, dumbfounded by my revelation, my hamstrings began to cramp and my feet went numb, but I knew it was no time to flush and flee. Instead, I bent down and reached in my back pocket, pulling out the encyclopedia of my life.

I began with the obvious, my driver’s license. Slipping the card out of its protective sleeve, my hand muscles suddenly revolted, the license crashing onto the tile floor.

We’re all fucked!

In a situation where your face is horribly disfigured by a bursting pipe of boiling water or the crazed attack of a rabid clawing kitten, the mortician would have no choice but to start with your driver’s license. After spending hours in line with the very scrotum of society as some – fill in your favorite ethnic, racial, or all around Republican mindset slur here – tells you to “looks here”, no one can be cute. Now I ask you: who in the hell wants to spend eternity looking like a late night Waffle House employee?

Discouraged by determined, I continued my excavation.

Receipts scrambled for freedom as I thumbed through the section where most would keep cash; I instead prefer to store a variety of worthless shit. Old hotel room card keys, an expired free smoothie coupon, and a promotional flyer for some strip clubbed shoved in my hand by a street urchin on my last trip to New Orleans. Judging from these relics, I look like some type of sexual deviant obsessed with the "Very Berry-Kiwi Quencher."

Digging deeper I find stained business cards of people I don’t even know, offering services that I don’t understand. Buried behind my maxed out credit card and my proof of insurance is the contact info for a psychologist I met at a teaching conference. Fabulous, between my driver’s license picture, the porn advertisement, and the therapist, I will be remembered as a freakish-looking sex crazed lunatic.

Now you might excuse yourself from these worries by labeling my concerns as paranoia, but the threats are very real. Remember back to 5th grade Social Studies and the island of Pompeii? Those poor people were devoured by an erupting volcano with their final actions perfectly preserved by the cooling lava. In middle school they only show you the pictures of the mother serving dinner and the children lying asleep in bed, but you can’t tell me there wasn’t somebody in that city taking a shit or pleasuring themselves in the bathroom. Where are those photos?What if your final contribution to the world was the odd contorted shape your face takes during orgasm? How awkward…

Now that I have opened this intellectual door, I have become obsessed with it. How will future societies judge and understand us? I was pondering this one recent afternoon while waiting to checkout at Walgreens, when I noticed the contents of the basket in front of me. As Lionel Riche’s Dancing on the Ceiling seeped through the poorly wired speakers, I shook my head and sighed: Kotex maxi pads, a Snickers bar, People magazine, and a liter of Mountain Dew. What if in that moment there was a freak volcano eruption or nuclear attack, and Walgreens was petrified in time, only to be awoken thousands of years from now by a group of future archeologists? What would they conclude?

I’ll tell you what they would think: that we were some sick mother fuckers performing strange menstruation rituals! I can see future scholars agonizing over how the People magazine came into play. “Clearly the bottled ‘mountain dew’ represents some kind of connection to the mother earth, and the nugget bar is clearly a phallic symbol, but I do not understand how all of this connects with the sad collapse of this Brittney Spears person or the man with no arms who swam the English Channel? Fascinating savages!”

With this new perspective, I can’t help but rethink my whole understanding of history and past civilizations. Maybe we were wrong about the extravagance of the Egyptians or the barbarity of the Aztecs. Maybe what we thought were mummification rites and human sacrifices were just their Walgreen’s lines.

Think about it…

Regardless, you can never be too careful, so I am going to clean out my wallet. Screw insurance cards and driver’s licenses. I am filling it to the brim with opera tickets and advertisements for charities serving people who cause me to lock my door when they stumble by my car. I am going to be immortalized properly damn it!