I, Antonius Block, play chess with Death.

Most close friends, loved ones, understand my fascination with death and dying. Well, maybe they don't understand, per se, but they are accepting of it. It's the Norse blood, some say.

After dedicating years to the folkloric study of death rituals and legends, cryonics, anthropology da morte, being deprived of death both by exclusion and by default* I have been reacquainted with it in the clinical setting. What an experience.

*In case you haven't noticed, sans the Veteran's Memorial in the Presidio, there are no cemeteries in San Francisco. I won't say what my mind conjures about the implication of that absence, but when in need, one can always visit Colma, California -- the city which has "inherited [our] hundreds of thousands of bodies." The story goes that the San Francisco board of supervisors "evicted" all of its cemeteries in 1912; by 1937, all the bodies were removed, making us San Francisco the city of the living. The city without the dead. Weird.