Don't Bother the Dead, They're Busy Decomposing

I've been thinking of holding a seance. I wasn't planning on contacting anyone in particular, just a general shout out to any of the departed who might have nothing better to do than talk to me. Think of it as the spiritualist equivalent of a facebook entry. Honestly where did anyone get the idea that talking to the dead is a good use of time? Ok, I'll admit it, I talk to the dead occasionally. I'm sure that most people do at one point or another. The strangeness comes when you start expecting the dead to talk back. Strangeness becomes total stupidity when your departed relatives cannot apparently chat to you without the intervention of some person neither of you has ever met before. Apparently the afterlife is on a party line and you have to go through the switchboard. And I thought Australia had a lousy telecommunications network.

It's also interesting to note that nobody in this life thinks that the dead have anything better to do with their (non) lives than hang around waiting for a call. Frankly if the dead wanted a conversation they would call you. Respect their privacy, you don't know what you might be interrupting. Personally once I'm dead I'm going to have the psychic equivalent of call waiting. Should anybody try to contact me all the medium is going to get is "Your call is important to us..." followed by elevator music. Or possibly I could get the hopeful seance holders redirected to a call centre in Tajikistan. One of the advantages to being dead in my opinion is surely a reduction in the amount of junk mail (or at least junk mail that you yourself have to open and deal with). Holding seances and summoning up the dead seems to be a pretty good way to piss them off to my way of thinking. Although if you are going to annoy somebody then a dead person is probably a good place to start. After all, what are they going to do about it? They're dead.

Possibly I'm being a little harsh. On immature reflection it occurs to me that there could be a lot of fun to be had in a seance. Not so much for the participants but for the dead. Think about it, this could be your opportunity to tell your relatives what you really think of them. This is the chance to settle all the old scores that built up during the course of your life. Did you always think your cousins children were poisonous little brats who were heading straight for gaol? Reach out from beyond the grave and tell her so. At the very least it might reduce the number of times your family bothers you when you should be enjoying your well earned rest.

Alternatively you could just screw with their minds. Tell them of a long lost family fortune and then let your voice fade out while giving directions. Or make up some dark family secret; sorrowfully inform your loved ones that an evil nobleman cursed your ancestors and now every member of the family is promised to Satan from birth. Then start screaming and shouting "It burns, it burns". My favourite would be to flatter all the attendees fulsomely and tell them that they were bound for heaven until they broke God's law by conducting a seance. Now they're headed straight for Hell unless they immediately go to Borneo and wash the feet of lepers. There's no end to the amount of fun the dead could have with a seance. What the living get out of it is less easy to determine. Some sort of guarantee that life goes on I suppose. Possibly these people don't understand what the definition of "dead" actually is. There is another possibility as well; talking to the dead is likely to be more entertaining and more useful than talking to many of the living. Particularly if the living people you know spend their time holding seances.

I know that many traditional (read "primitive") cultures have a habit of communicating with the dead or other denizens of the spirit realm. For starters if you weren't good at hunting being a witch doctor would ensure that there was always meat in your pot. They usually had access to any good drugs going around as well. All of the above cultures had a couple of things in common. They had very little leisure time and very little to do with it if they got any. In this day and age we don't need mediums, shamen or witchdoctors; we have playstations.