The Devil Went Down to Georgia to Legally Compost Your Corpse

Turning people into compost is a topic I’ve (com)posted about before, in the context of making arrangements to autocompost yourself. What I didn’t anticipate was that funerary composting has become so appealing it’s the subject of a bipartisan bill in Georgia.

SB 241, aka the “Breaking Bad Bill” because people died in grisly ways on that show and this bill is about rotting bodies I guess, has already passed the Georgia legislature and awaits the governor’s signature. “It’s just human composting,” is the cryptic reassurance from bill cosponsor Sen. Rick Williams (R-Milledgeville), who as you can guess from his warm demeanor is in the funeral business. He’s also a COVID vaccine skeptic because allegedly his embalmer noticed that a lot of the vaccinated corpses he worked on were unusually blotchy. That’s nothing to do with compost but I thought it was super weird.

Anyway, interesting side note:

Technically legal though perhaps inadvisable covers so many of my favorite activities. So you can already compost a body in Georgia without a fancy mortician getting involved? Just another money grab from Big Funeral. But what if I want to be composted and then blown out of a shotgun?

The options are to have a picture painted with your remain or get turned into bullets. Normal. Sure enough, having your ashes (or now, compost) loaded into shotgun shells or a variety of other calibers is definitely a thing. Man I miss the South.

Of my many missed internet paydays, the only one I really regret is Medium. Remember Medium??!? It’s still around and doing stuff! Just not with the financial largesse that once attracted writers and editors and publications like [simile for something more dignified than flies to feces, please -ed.].

The Golden Age of Medium Money wasn’t even that long ago, something like 2016-2017 depending on your paystubs. Medium was then still in thrall to the broad vision and vast pocketbook of founder Evan Williams. I liked the interface and apparent dedication to supporting editorial projects with promotion and cash, and I’d launched a few side projects from my day jobs on the platform to reasonable success.

From those inroads, I’d heard they were looking to buy more creative work, including fiction. So I pitched a serialized sci-fi novel about viral artificial intelligence, which was rapidly and breathtakingly accepted for a low five-figure advance. Not life-changing money but officially Nice, especially for a project that would be low pressure and a lot of fun to write. They say if you love what you grift you’ll never work a day in your life, or something.

Sadly, saner heads prevailed, and I think my check was manually canceled while someone at Medium was on a plane to get fired about it. They subsequently shut down all that fun stuff, and then egregiously stopped paying a bunch of publications that had ripped up stakes in the Real World to relocate to Medium based on promises and prayers. That sucked much worse for them than for me and my goofy Online Book Story.

These days my novel writing particles are focused on a manuscript about redneck criminals, but I wouldn’t mind returning to the evil AI novel someday. AI is so hot right now! Like so hot it’s burning up the oceans and incinerating more money than Evan Williams ever dreamed of. Please direct inquiries care of my agent (me).