It’s funny how the mind works sometimes. I was sitting in the porch swing reading about a UCLA executive who had plead guilty to trafficking in human body parts. He was making big bucks selling bones and other stuff from cadavers.

Now this is a very serious, morbid, callous kind of thing. It is disrespectful to those who have donated their bodies to science.

But even so, I could not control where my mind would go, and all of a sudden I was singing an old John Prine song called “Please Don’t Bury Me.”

For those who don’t know, John Prine is a folk singer. Some folks like him, some folks don’t. I do.

Anyway the singer wakes up, puts on his slippers, goes into the kitchen, slips, bangs his head on the floor and dies.

Now given this scenario, it would seem the fodder for a very short song. And some songs should be short. I was listening to one on the sound system in the gym while working out the other day, and I thought it would never end. The same lyrics were repeated over and over. There was a time when that would have meant the record was stuck. But today, I think it just means that vocabularies are very limited.

Anyway, it’s the chorus of John’s song that came to me after reading this morbid news.

It goes in part likes this:

“Please don’t bury me

down in the cold, cold ground.

No I’d druther have ‘em’ cut me up and spread my parts around.

Throw my brain in a hurricane and the blind can have my eyes.

And the deaf can take both of my ears, if they don’t mind the size.

Give my stomach to Milwaukee, if they run out of beer.

...Hand me down my walking cane, I cannot tell a lie.