About this episode
You ever go on a field trip at school and every time you look over your shoulder, there’s a teacher or chaperone giving you the stink eye? Well try to imagine a field trip where you look up and all your old relatives are waving you into a tunnel of white light. On today’s very special milestone 100th Episode: you’ll hear about my school trip to a French strip club; you would learn about a man of God who unintentionally brought a flock of young faithful to meet him; and you will see why I believe riding through a tornado would be somehow less frightening and uncomfortable than the rigors of today’s story.And if you had been listening on Patreon… you would learn how a single school trip shaped my entire world view while listening to Chaka Khan; you would hear about some of the worst ways people have finished school trips unexpectedly early; you would learn about the fake US president who died from the largest landslide ever recorded in human history; and you would learn how today’s tragedy could have prevented by simple diarrhea. I mentioned the Oregon Trail earlier in this episode, specifically the Oregon Trail video game from the 80s. It was made as a learning tool about decision making and resource management, but it also teaches that you can do everything right and still die. It’s an important thing to remember, and beyond that, this episode taught me how one very young brush with death became the moment this show was born – I just didn’t know it yet. It’s a long story, and I preserved it for Patreon. For them, I also finished the episode with Chaka Khan’s “I Feel For You”, to let you judge just how much or how little it feels like the jam you would have wanted to die to.I mention two things at the end of the episode. First I wanted to call out Kala and her husband Ben for kind of exercisming things at Funeral Kazoo and looking to do some cool stuff for future of the show. Ben, being a native of the American Northwest, yelled in my face that he wanted an episode from this land we've never visited. I said, Ben, I'll get you your dead children, watch me go – and here we are. I'm never happy when a story involves the death of children, but almost half of the would-be victims bailed with cramps and gas and all sorts of things and unknowingly saved themselves from making today's story worse. The second thing was that I would post a very short video on Patreon for paid and unpaid members to hopefully see grief in a different way. I'm going to encourage you to stop thinking of your life as a straight-line journey from cradle to grave and more like a tree, spinning around the sun every year, growing and maturing and changing from the inside-out. I want you to think about grief like a roadblock you keep having to hurdle, that gets just a little bit easier with every try. Head over the Patreon.com/funeralkazoo
