please stop my funeral
"You tell people what you are," sighed giant-lipped rapper Chuck D back in ANSWER Me! #1, "and people still don't believe you."
I felt Mistah Chuck's pain back then, and I still feel it on this rainy September eve—not the pain attendant to four hundred years of oppression, nor the pain of the slavemaster's whip, nor even the pain of growing up in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood and clocking major G's—but the existential torment of articulating myself with the cold gleaming finesse of a surgeon's scalpel and having the great pink-and-brown turd called "humanity" act as if I'm speaking another language.
The picture to the right (a larger, more legible version is nestled here) is from a 1969 Supergirl comic called "PLEASE STOP MY FUNERAL!" I first encountered it in a box of my brother's books back while he was being slowly driven mad in Vietnam. And, apart from the blonde hair, friendly boobs, and snappin' 'gina, I identified with Supergirl's plight. She's at her own funeral—she can even see her own casket—yet she's screaming that she's alive. And no one, not even her loved ones, can see or hear her. They're certain she's dead.
When I pinch myself, I feel it. But when I start to scream about it, most of the deadwoods go solemnly about their business—deaf, blind, and hopelessly dumb.
