Beth's excuse for body snatching; "I'm not sick, I'm a HISTORIAN"

Just so you know, after the last post, I’m not sitting in the dark, chewing on a hangnail and thinking morbid thoughts about myself while planning how I’m going to play “The Unforgiven” at my funeral. That’s not the type o Goth I am. Not when I can go to the Titanic exhibit like I did on Monday and think morbid thoughts about OTHER people dying. The roving Titanic exhibit complete with the genuine artifacts recovered from the ocean bottom are at the local museum. Personally I find the whole thing in dubious taste, particularly the recovery and display of the “stewards jacket” which has the name of the guy with the note beside it; “did not survive the disaster” a.k.a. – look at this jacket with the White Star logo which we took once the guy inside had been eaten by organisms at the bottom of the ocean! There are even pop-up cards you can buy in the gift shop (attached to the exhibit!) showing divers looting (sorry, I must mean, historically examining) the wreck. It simply makes me want to wheel on over to our own Victorian Cemetery with a few shovels and do some historical examination of the period myself. I wonder how locals would take it if I set up a special exhibit of things I “found?” (And who says “body snatching” is a lost art?)

As for the exhibit, it was okay, a little missing on info, and high on drama (“once in the water people had 15 minutes to call for help before dying of hypothermia. The air would have been filled with the cries of the dying”). Luckily one volunteer was Mr. Obsessive who knew just about EVERY person who lived or died and how that happened and gave the example of a White Star worker, a baker, who while completely drunk, literally stepped off the stern just as it was going under, swam around for over two hours and was picked up....still drunk. He bragged that he “never got his hair wet.” Anyway, enough about that, if you want to know about Titanic, you can buy one of the several million books which seem to have been published on the subject. By the by, the Titanic, in terms of civilian naval casualties on an ocean liner is about 9th or so; the M/V WILHELM GUSTLOFF lost estimated 9,400 people (including almost 9000 civilians and another 162 wounded soldiers) in 1945 compared to Titanic’s 1,508. True, they were german civilians killed during WWII, which would bring up other certain issues (like the deliberate firebombing of civilians towns) while the Titanic is a much more politically free disaster (and full of rich people and cool pictures of staircases). In case you would like to make your own morbid exhibit, German deep sea divers found the wreck of the Gustloff three years ago.

Yesterday I was busy with doctors and test, seeing an Internist specialist who seemed to know the right questions to ask and getting me even more tests which included my getting 16 blood tests later that day. Knowing my EXTREME needle phobia, you can imagine how fun that was (I was heavily doped; I suggested since they needed so many samples they just siphon it into a jug and take the samples from that. The tech said, “Oh, we have a comedian.” While I peered in a puzzled doped haze at her wondering why everyone though a sensible suggestion was comedy?). So after the blood tests I slept...a lot.

But I will be back, hopefully tomorrow with deep.....eh.......stuff to blog about. I just thought it better that people didn’t think that I was moping about, hiding under black sheets and getting maudlin. My gothic retreat into cobwebbed delusion and madness should be firmly placed under “coming attractions.”