I am not the best writer, and I can’t always identify what is “the best” writing when I’m reading it.  My sensibilities differ from those of the critical elite.  I had little patience in school, undergraduate and graduate, for literary theory; I’m more of a visceral response kind of girl.  Whatever.  I like what I like.  I’m OK with you liking what you like.  I get twerked by pretension and people who pretend to have cornered the market on the knowledge of what’s good and what’s not.

Still, I know when something is clearly not good.  And it disappoints me when people take shortcuts.

Dexter, the Showtime series about the serial killer with a heart of gold (whatnow?) made such a misstep last week.

SPOILER ALERT.

Big, Big, Big, SPOILER COMING.

This season is taking on the Big Kahuna symbolically, good vs. evil manifested in religion.  Thematically, this has always been its domain – sort of hard to avoid when your protagonist is a vigilante psychopath serial killer your audience is always rooting for.  But in the last episode, the bad boy turned good, we think, portrayed spectacularly by Mos Def, the character of Brother Sam, is shot.

We see in the previews for next week’s episode that Brother Sam might live.

Boo.

Not that I wish ill upon Brother Sam.  He is a great character.  A great guy (if he doesn’t turn out to be, in some Dexter-esque plot twist, a sick mofo still hellbent on murderous destruction) full of light and love and instruction and openmindedness and peace, and Mos Def is an acting revelation.  The guy is one of the greatest actors I’ve seen in…ever on television.

But in life, and how ironic that this is the thematic and symbolic crux of the season of Dexter and they blew it, bad shit happens.  Really bad shit.  Just two weeks ago, Dexter’s son got really sick and squeaked through.  You don’t get two “squeak through’s” in two weeks.  If someone walks into a garage, shoots a good guy character at point blank range in the chest a few times, the guy needs to die.  You can’t have it both ways.  Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the bad stuff that happens is informative and leads to growth or change.  Sometimes, often, it’s just sucky. That’s life.  It’s good and it’s bad and there’s both and we have to learn to handle them both when they come at us.  We can be sad about Brother Sam;  we should be sad about Brother Sam, but we have to learn how to handle what happens to Brother Sam, we can’t be bailed out by the eternal Deus ex Machina that we’re all trained to expect anymore.

I feel bad hoping that Brother Sam isn’t going to make it.  I feel even worse about the fact that I think he should have died on the spot on that filthy garage floor.  He adds so much to that already terrific show.  Still, we can’t always have a happy ending.

If you look carefully, you can spot four new items that weren’t there last year.

I get more into this Day of the Dead thing every year.  I’ve come to hope that my kids will carry this tradition on themselves and even if they don’t set up their own annual displays, that when my time comes, they’ll find themselves on one late October evening, probably a little irritated at the ridiculousness of it all, fashioning a skeleton out of modeling clay – one with dark hair with a white streak in the front.

I went to a funeral the other day, for the wife of a family friend – not someone I knew well, but still…the funerals, they tend to give one pause, don’t they, even if one (me) isn’t (wasn’t?) intimately connected with the deceased.

Just so we’re all clear, a few rules suggestions for when it is my turn:

• No ceremonies, services, what have you’s in ugly rooms.  Not even a non-descript room.  Either a really nice space, a beautiful space, an inspiring or elegant space, or outside.
• No fake plants, no fake fire.
• No euphemisms.  “Passed” might be totally OK with you, it might be comforting.  If that works for you, I am down.  I’m not planning on “passing.”  Unless something totally amazing happens, I’m pretty sure I’m eventually going to just die.  You can use that word.  Died.
• I don’t want anybody I didn’t know talking about me.  Not even by way of introduction or “Hey, come on in and have a seat.”  God forbid somebody pronounce my name wrong.  That would really suck.  Not a good way to go out, and so embarrassing for everybody there.  I don’t want a bunch of mortified people at my whatever-it-is.
• Speaking of whatever-it-is…the official plan is cremation, it’s even in the will.  I can’t imagine where I would even want to be buried because there isn’t any one place that I would want my people (children) to feel compelled to be tied to.  I guess I was thinking it would be nice if some ashes could end up in Montana and some in Maine and some wherever anybody else wanted them. But there’s a little glitch with that, and I don’t mean to get all serious and upsetting, but I suppose this should be written somewhere and seeing how nothing on the internet ever goes away, it might as well be here.  If (I don’t even want to write this so I know I just said “no euphemisms” up there, but I’m going to euphemism this up in a large way) something horrible should occur before my children are old enough to be cool with the whole cremation thing, somebody is going to have to call an audible.   Right now, they won’t even let us flush dead fish, so I’m pretty sure cremation would be O-U-T.
• The food and liquor needs to be good.  Doesn’t have to be tons of it, but it better be good.
• If the turnout doesn’t look like it’s going to be very good, hire people.  I am totally not kidding about this.  Yes.  I am that vain.  True, I won’t know if you don’t actually do this, but keep in mind that I might haunt you.  Forever.

What I love about this day, Dia de Los Muertos, is that it’s a celebration of the life that was, not a mourning of the life that isn’t anymore.  Dispelling anything too scary to contemplate or too sad to plan for or consider isn’t as daunting when I tackle it with sugar skulls and cookies and figures I made out of clay at my dining room table with my kids helping.  Adding golf clubs and dog tags to signify my grandfather or a picture of the Pimlico racecourse to represent my husband’s grandmother helps us remember what was special about the people we lost.  Even a glittery silver miniature headstone with my first dog’s name on it allows me a few moments to think about how great that dog was and how I never would have the stones to pick up and move to Missoula, Montana, without him.

Happy Day of the Dead.