Dying in a McDonald's Parking Lot

The sunlight is fading sooner and the nights are getting longer. The nights have been particularly long as of late, because I picked up a stomach virus, and my battles with it have been brutal. I now know what it feels like to have my peaceful village burned to cinders by a swarm of berserkers. Actually, it’s not as bad as the stomach flu I got last winter, but it’s shitty city nonetheless. So that’s my current burden, which will give way to some other burden next week. Right now, I’m not eating anything, and I have all the time I need to feed my irrational fears, and think about stupid things.




One of my biggest fears is dying in a parking lot. Stroking off or otherwise suddenly dying in the parking lot of a grocery store would be awful. And yes, I know that if I’m dead, it couldn’t possibly embarrass me, but I don’t care. I can’t let it happen.

My Hebrew school principal died in a McDonald’s parking lot. They found him slumped over the steering wheel. He had terminal cancer and was fading fast, so it wasn’t surprising that he passed. And even though I didn’t particularly like him (he kicked me out of Hebrew school), I remember hearing about it and thinking it was the saddest goddamned thing in the world. What an undignified way to die. And I thought about who might have found him - A customer? A McDonald’s employee? – And I thought about his family. How could they ever think about McDonald’s the same way again? I know I couldn't. There are McDonald’s everywhere, so the memory would be inescapable. Hell, every time I pass a Brown’s Chicken, and there aren’t that many, I shudder because I’m reminded of the Brown’s Chicken massacre back in ’93. (FYI: The murder site is becoming a Chase bank, which is a fantastic idea because ghosts love money.)




Maybe it’s the thought of dying alone in a flat concrete wasteland that makes me anxious. Maybe it's the soullessness of modern commercial landscapes and the horror of being defeated there. I don’t know why the prospect makes me so sad, but here I am, thinking about it. And it doesn’t make me feel any better.