Sam Allard, Scene
This past week, vandals knocked over numerous headstones at the Erie Street Cemetery, which is the final resting place of over 8,000 Clevelanders, including 150 veterans. I get it – cemeteries are creepy and who cares about headstones anyway? I mean, they belong to dead people. They’re just meaningless hunks of stone that the relatives of those who died spent hundreds of dollars on in order to hopefully purchase a small piece of immortality for their loved ones and create a physical monument that proves that love transcends death. But who needs eternal love when you’re a bored asshole roaming a cemetery at night?
I recommend roaming a cemetery. There is a certain calm beauty there. It’s so still, you’re surrounded by nothing but still markers of lives previously lived, births and deaths and loves that came and then went and may no longer be remembered by anyone living, as if these silent stones are the only proof that anyone was ever here before you, as though you too will one day die and be marked by nothing but a mute headstone which will one day be forgotten by time until one day a group of individuals are so drunk and high and bored that they take the only proof of your existence and smash it into the earth because they are total dicks who also haven’t yet realized that they too will one day die and be forgotten. But they will. (An aside to those individuals – YOU WILL TOO.)
But maybe I’m wrong and these sacred markers of lives past were vandalized for perfectly good reason. Here are the valid reasons I could come up with for someone knocking over headstones at the Erie Street Cemetery:
- Was being chased by a swarm of bees and accidentally bumped into all of them
- Tried cow tipping first, but those heifers were too feisty
- Lorenzo Carter, the first citizen of Cleveland who is buried in the Erie Street Cemetery, stood up my great, great, great, great grandmother
- Developing new workouts for my CrossFit studio
- Confused about how to play Pokemon Go
- Just read a Wikipedia article about the singularity and therefore no longer believe in death
- Still mad about the Spanish-American war
- Morally opposed to Garamond font
- Ghosthunting reality show isn’t going well, need to scare up business
- Just drank a strength potion, wanted to test it out
- Not clear on how parkour works
- Fuck those dead guys, always thinking they’re better than me
- Jill said she’d put her hand down my pants for ten whole seconds for each one I knocked over
- Joc-O-Sot owes me money
So if you are one of the mystery vandals and your motivation for upsetting the final resting place of strangers is listed above then, well, I guess we can all understand. But if you did it just for fun, or a laugh, or a way to momentarily distract yourself from your own sad life and inevitable death, then to you I say: I really hope that future dickheads are nicer to your grave.
