Funeral Pyre and My Winter Travels

So this winter break, I finally took some time off of work to travel. It has been almost 3 years since I last visited China, and honestly, it is still the Mad Max-esque industrial shit hole that once encapsulated my grungy post university brooding. One highlight of the trip was that I finally visited my grandfather's grave. My grandfather passed away last year. He and I were never close, and the whole journey felt very much like a choreographed dance in which I did exactly what everyone thought I should do- pay respect, question my mortality, prostrate myself to the somber grave, etc.

One peculiar superstitious tradition that has survived into the modern chinese culture is the burning of fake paper money for the dead. For those unfamiliar to the act, the idea is that the dead requires money to spend as much as the living. So every so often, the survivors of the deceased burn fake money to pass on to their loved ones. Obviously, such a monetary regime has dire consequences in terms of inflation and production in the afterlife (yeah, I'm still an economist). However lets save the economic analysis for another post.

On this occasion, I was accompanied by my father. Dad in his ever baby-boomeresque enthusiasm took several very VERY large stacks of paper to burn. Certainly, my father didn't and shouldn't believe in this stuff. He was a professor, a physician, and someone who upon many occasions confessed to me that this was a superstitious non-sense. Yet, there he was contributing to global warming as all the dumb ill educated masses by burning stacks and stacks of carbon...

You know, when I'm gone, I think I would like to be burned in a funeral pyre a la The Phantom Menace. It's not traditional, but why would I stick to tradition when I'm dead? Maybe it can be done in a very liberal state, so I can write into my will that I want cannibis to be included in the kindling for my pyre. Nothing says you'll miss someone than salivating over his cremating body while fighting a case of the giggles and the munchies.