the problem with leftovers
So last night I was pondering, as I’ve had occasion to off and on over the last 2 months, just what the heck I should do with this five-pound canister of leftover Lochlainn.
It occurred to me that I’d missed a perfect chance. Just picture Sunday night after cleaning up Border Skirmish…a small raft moored out in the lake, a couple of torches at the waterside…a quiver of arrows-wooden, of course-carefully prepared, and the best archer I can find. Words, a toast-and a flaming arrow sets the raft ablaze.
Damn, I wish I’d thought of this sooner. It would’ve been so appropriate to do it at a place he put so much time and effort and sweat into.
And the notion of “sweat”-hence salt-got me curious about what exactly is in the canister.
Warning: the content below may be perceived as creepy, morbid, or just plain gross. So you’ve been warned; don’t complain if you do choose to read it, and I won’t complain if you choose not to. 8D
The stuff is just weird. When you picture “ashes,” you think of something grey-white and fluffy like what’s left after a campfire. But those are the by-product of cellulose burned at a relatively low temp. This is…more like fine cornmeal, or dusty sand, a fine grey-beige grit with little white chips that look like the bits of broken shell you might find at the tide-line on a beach.
So, being me, I did some research. (For what it’s worth, no, I didn’t find it gross. Everybody has their gag triggers, this isn’t one of mine. But then I find blood fascinating too.) It’s estimated that the average cremains wind up being about 3.5% of the person’s body weight. Given that Himself weighed in the neighborhood of 190 pounds…okay, it’s more like a 6- or 7-pound canister. I mean, really, I just wasn’t expecting there to be this much! You hear people talk about “sprinkling” or “strewing” someone’s ashes, and you get a mental impression of maybe a cup or two-not something roughly equivalent in volume to (though considerably heavier than) a loaf of bread. Nor would it float on a breeze like wood ash-it would tend to fall, rather like salting your driveway.
The majority of it is calcium in some form or another, mostly carbonate; about a quarter of the rest is phosphorus and another tenth is potassium, with smidgens of various and sundry other minerals that didn’t sublime off at 700-800 degrees F. That makes it comparable to sand-not the silica sand of decomposed quartz that one finds in fresh water, but more like the limestone-based sand of wave-tumbled coral atolls. There’s a bit of both sodium and chlorine left…hmmm, appropriate for a salty old sea dog, no? Any lumps of metal have been removed (so much for getting a little recycling on the titanium tooth posts) and what’s left is pulverized so no one’s dog can dig up and bring home anything recognizable.
And then they put it in a bag in a neatly labeled box, and you get to figure out what the hell to do with it now.
“What do you do with a drunken sailor…”