I've recently become deeply concerned about my neighbors and the things I'm learning about my current living situation. You see, I live in a West Coast American city where I rent a small home from a very nice man who owns the adjacent mortuary. My home, along with a few small businesses, is located on the same half block as the parlor and the associated crematory. The aging funeral director is a very good landlord who is easy to get along with and tolerant of the music I sometimes play too loud, along with the other neighbors. He's a tall, thin, quiet gentleman who dresses impeccably, drives a Buick that's new every few years, and still enjoys the odd cigar. He wears his thin gray hair rather long, walks a bit stooped and very slowly, although he's in pretty good health But it's his eyes that strike a person before anything else about the man, as they don't seem to have any definite color - kind of gray, kind of blue, shades of brown and green. They never look at you, just through, or past, like he's looking at someone in the distance. Oh yeah, there's one other distinctive feature: he always smells like embalming chemicals and, while he always dressed nicely, he doesn't seem to bath too often. His long gray hair is almost invariable unkempt. The man's name is Mr. Barry Morgan, or Mortician Morgan

Mr. Morgan also rents to a tattoo artist named Ben who recently started his own business after finishing an apprenticeship. Ben's parlor is next to my home behind the funeral parlor, just behind the building that houses the crematorium. I had Ben recolor a tattoo I acquired a few years back, hoping to make it look new again and get a feel for his work in case I decided to get another. As I waited for Ben to finish with another customer, I couldn't avoid staring at the poodle sleeping by the dentist's chair he's turned into a tattoo chair where he seats his canvases. The dog's hair has been entirely shaved and the full size poodle sports very well done tattoos of various cat caricatures over about ninety percent of her body, some being famous cartoons.

As my turn arrived I sat down in the tattoo chair, rolling up my sleeve as Ben prepared his instruments. At that moment both a beagle and a dachshund dashed into the room, waking the poodle who seemed to be annoyed by their intrusion. The dachshund was covered in colorful beagle caricatures and the beagle was covered with poodle tattoos. Ben began explaining when all three dogs took after a large cat that had entered the room sporting lifelike tattoos of all three dogs.

To say I was dumbfounded is an understatement. Ben pulled a bottle of Sang Som from beneath the counter, lighting a blunt of Purple Panacea, which is the famous, genetically modified, strain grown from the MedTree of Life. But that's another story.

Setting his "tat" gun down, Ben poured a glass of Sang Som for each of us, inhaling deeply from his blunt before passing it to me. I declined, as I felt fine and didn't need any medicine. Ben Smiled, as he looked at me from behind thick glasses mounted below his shiny bald forehead. He sat his enormous frame on his work bench and began speaking: "You see Johnny; I need a lot of practice these pets provide. You'll appreciate the time I've spent working on them when you see the results of my efforts. I've kept these three because they were a learning experience, but now I'm good enough to market Tat Cats and Design Dogs. A fellow in Europe preserves them in playful poses using a technique I don't fully understand. All I know is that the animals are preserved indefinitely in a postmortem state that leaves them looking almost exactly as you've just seen them."

I asked Ben where he gets the animals from before he went on: "They come from free ads on the internet, in the paper, or from a friend of mine who works at a pet boarding facility."

I looked at Ben with what must have been an alarmed expression as he finished: "Yes, I know what you're thinking, but my friend sizes up the owners before telling them the animal has been lost. With dogs he only takes animals that have been docked because their lives are already disrupted. Docking a dog is barbaric, and - if Bo Obama and Dogs Against Docking have their way - will soon be a thing of the past. Dogs use their tails to communicate, wagging them to tell others that their intentions are friendly. Without tails they are perceived by other dogs as hostile, meaning that docking disrupts a significant part of canine culture."

Anticipating my next question, Ben went on, "No, there's nothing inhumane in tattooing an animal. They're well medicated before procedures and seem to enjoy the needle as much as being petted."

As we spoke Mr. Morgan walked into Ben's parlor, his tall, lean frame looked a bit more stooped than it usually does, and he looked very tired to boot. Ben handed Barry Morgan the remainder of the medicine he'd been smoking, which the tired old man gratefully accepted. He pulled long and hard at the blunt before reaching for the small glass Ben had filled with Sang Som for him. The mortician casually slammed the rum, setting the glass on the counter beside Ben's guns and colors where Ben refilled it as Mr. Morgan looked past the scene toward something no one else could see. I wondered, for a moment, what it's like to deal with death on nearly a daily basis; if it's detrimental to one's psychological well-being, or just another job. As a young man I'd visited a slaughterhouse that specialized in chickens. Trucks carrying large trailers filled with live chickens would arrive at a loading dock where the birds were hung upside down on an overhead conveyor that took them to a man in a rain suit who wore a face shield he was constantly wiping. The man would cut their throats with a razor before they convulsed past him to be taken off the conveyor for processing. My eyes met the man's for a moment before I realized that he stood as dead as the chickens at the end of the line.

Mr. Morgan invariably dresses in black. He wears a gold crucifix hanging from a thick chain around his neck. The cross shines from his upper torso like a candle in pitch black darkness. Morgan constantly smokes Lucky Strike cigarettes - the ones without filters - inhaling too deeply as if on some sort of suicidal mission. His teeth should be stained tar yellow, but he obviously bleaches them too white, as we see some people do. The yellow gold, silver hair and gleaming white enamel creates a brilliant contrast against his Lab black suit. Ben picked up his gun as he sat to begin his work while Morgan stared at something I imagined was the end of a conveyor or, perhaps, beyond the end of that line. The three of us had fallen silent and remained that way for a long time while Ben's gun buzzed and my tattoo began coming back to life.

Presently Barry looked at the tattoo, examining it carefully, like a jeweler might examine a gemstone. Remembering the heat problem in my small home I asked Barry about the centralized heating system and why it might smell a bit foul. Nonchalantly he said, "Well... when we burn larger bodies the afterburner doesn't always clear the air as it's supposed to."

In absolute disbelief and shock, I looked at the mortician, asking the obvious question about the source of our heat. Barry went on, "We do a pretty good business here. It takes about 90 minutes to cremate your average corpse - a bit longer for larger, and quite a while for XXXXXL bodies. Sometimes I forget to turn the central heat off when we get the big ones. That's what you smell - the large ones overwork the afterburner and we get a bit of smoke and smell with our heat. Could be that the ink isn't burning too well either."

Barry stopped his work, set his gun down and looked at me, smiling with his eyes and saying, "Told you I need lots of practice."

I was having a difficult time understanding and believing that my house is heated by residual heat from a cremator and my neighbor is practicing his art on corpses, but we do live in Portland, Oregon, which may be one of the stranger places on earth - behind Bangkok. I didn't know what to say, but Barry seemed to read my thoughts.

Barry kicked his feet up on the counter after pouring another glass of Sang Som from Ben's bottle. His eyes narrowed a bit as a sorrowful expression came to his face and he began speaking:
"You see, Son, it only matters to us how our homes are heated. The dead are as indifferent as I am and you should be. As for the tattoos, it's only the living who care about such things. The bones folk ingested after the atomic bombings in Japan didn't care who ate them. We are just chemicals and energy flowing through space and time like water cycles from sky to stream, to sea, to sky and back again. Everything is impermanent, and not nearly as important as the primates suffering their delusions of grandeur like to think things are."

Ben picked his gun up to begin working again as he and I considered the things Barry had said. The old man went on to say, "You boys get your fucking while you're young and do your drinking when you get old. That's the advice my father gave me, and it might be the best advice I've ever received when I consider the things I've seen in this business."

Having said all he wanted to, Mr. Morgan fell silent while Ben finished his work before I went back to my place. The evening was early, but it was dark out and rain fell from clouds that obscured most of the light from the full moon as a soft, warm wind blew down from the Columbia Gorge. I sat down upon a soft old Papasan in a corner of the living room and picked up an old mortuary supply catalogue Barry had given me to look at after I expressed an interest while paying my rent in his office one day. With the catalogue open, I didn't see what I held, but thought of young Sadako Sasaki, Omoiyari and paper cranes.

I was grateful to the folk warming my living room.