The National Synthetic Grief Olympics [NSGO] Deadline

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

This is just a reminder.  If you, or your community, plan to enter the NSGO this year, time is running out.   For the orchestrated [team] events the competition is going to be stiff and the weather’s likely to be hot. 

Parades might be out of the question unless your community is prepared to haul off horseflesh collapsed on the streets and fried to the pavement.  Evening candlelight services conducted a few hours after sundown might be a better option.  That will allow the darkness to hide the furtive yawns while the names are being read from the podiums and so on.  It will also take a lot of the pressure off those who’d prefer to go home and watch television after they’ve carefully shown their faces and pronounced themselves present and grief-stricken. 

Slipping away to the car in darkness will maintain the illusion of mourners for the dedicated name-readers, and deniability later.  There’s even a next-day potential for smug, holier-than-thou denouncements of those who sneaked off without having to actually have stayed.

But the individual competitions will be tough this years, as well.  A lot of celebrities bit the dust this year, while a few big ones from the past are still lingering to be celebrated for the novelty.  Michael Jackson, JFK, Pearl Harbor, Elvis Presley and Rin Tin Tin come to mind.

If you’re only in this for a lot of public drama, pretense and shameless exploitation of the dead, you probably still have some time to prepare.  But if you’re in this to sell flags and bumper stickers, or create a commercial illusion of patriotic zeal for people to pretend to believe, you need to be out there now.

Old Jules