Basically Dead: The Catastrophe Hour Book Club Week 3
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Hi, it's Megan. This is a quick note to tell you about an exciting event that's coming up this October in New York City. It's an unspeak-easy retreat on steroids. It's not only co-ed, since you guys have been asking for it, it is bigger than our usual retreats with more participants and a lot of speakers.

Those speakers include John McWhorter, Peter Moskos, Mike Peska, Carol Hoeven, Lisa Sellin-Davis, Alana Newhouse, Ben Appel, Andrew Hartz, and a lot more. We are still adding speakers. Oh, and me. I will be there.

The way it's going to work is the speakers will do panels or be interviewed, sometimes by me, sometimes by other people. And pretty quickly, those panels will open up to include the attendees and it will turn into a discussion, not just an audience Q&A, but a real conversation where you can interact with your intellectual heroes.

Like all Unspeak Easy retreats, it is totally off the record. No social media. Everything that happens stays in the Unspeak Easy retreat. Beautiful space. It will be in a gorgeous space yet to be announced. This is happening October 11th and 12th from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. Lunch is included.

It's co-ed, and it will be unlike anything you've ever experienced, and unlike anything we've ever done at The Unspeakeasy. Spaces are limited, so go to theunspeakeasy.com slash retreats to find out how to sign up. Hope to see you there. Hi, and welcome to this special edition of the podcast. What you're about to hear is an excerpt from an essay in my new book, The Catastrophe Hour, which was published in April.

I am running a book club this summer where we read an essay each week and talk about it on Zoom. Since there are 14 essays in the book, the club will run for 14 consecutive weeks every Wednesday from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern Time, starting on June 11th and ending on September 10th. The way it's going to work is each week I will release a short audio excerpt of the essay that we're discussing the following week.

It's not the whole essay, so you should still buy the book, but it should give you a taste. The book club is available to paying Substack subscribers who are subscribed at the annual level, which is a better bargain anyway. If you cannot make the meeting, you will have access to a recording, but only if you're a member of the book club.

If you are not yet a paying subscriber at the annual level, you can upgrade your subscription and we will make sure that you get a link to the Zoom meeting. If you discover this book club at any point during its run, you can still join. This is a book of essays that are arranged in the order in which they were written between 2016 and 2024. You will not be lost if you join in the middle, though it's nice to read from the beginning.

I will say that there is not yet an audio book available for this title, so these audio excerpts are as much listening as you're going to get right now. You can buy the book wherever books are sold. You can become a paying subscriber or upgrade your subscription by going to TheUnspeakablePodcast.com or MeganDown.substack.com. Those go to the same place. Now, please enjoy this week's excerpt from The Catastrophe Hour.

Basically dead, January 2019. I think a lot about being dead, not necessarily dying. I try not to think about that or death, but deadness, specifically my own eventual state thereof.

I think about lying underground and decaying into the earth, my flesh feasted upon by parasites and spores, my bones eroding into the soil, my organs liquefying and being siphoned up through tree roots.

As though listening to a yoga instructor telling me to relax each body part one by one during the final savasana portion of a class, release your left foot, exhale out your right shoulder, let your spleen melt into the floorboards, I imagine the incremental corrosion of my carcass. I imagine the passing of a season or two until wildflowers grow over me like a blanket.

I run through this sequence of thoughts at various times of the day and night, when I'm laying in bed trying to fall asleep, when I'm sitting at my desk trying to work, when I'm stuck in traffic staring at a mile of taillights stretched out ahead of me on the highway. You might find this morbid. To me, it's soothing. I'm still in my 40s, reasonably happy and, as far as I know, perfectly healthy, but

But there's something almost meditative about conjuring my physical being in a state of active disintegration. I don't know how or when I'm going to die, but I do know that when it happens, I want a green burial. Loved ones, please take note. Sometimes called a natural burial, though definitions and standards of greenness vary, this is when a body is buried without embalming inside a shroud or a container that can decompose right into the soil.

The gold standard of green burials takes place on land trusts that have been set aside as permanent conservation easements and are maintained according to certain restoration ecology principles, but these, unsurprisingly, are few and far between. The next best thing is often a hybrid cemetery, which offers burial areas that minimize environmental impact by using only biodegradable caskets and shrouds and never burying embalmed bodies.

Many religions, such as Judaism and Islam, practice natural burial anyway. So in that case, it's not particularly exotic. It should also be said that cremation rates have steadily increased over the last several decades and now account for just over half of body disposals. But considering that the funeral industry still puts more than a million and a half tons of concrete and more than four million gallons of formaldehyde-soaked embalming fluid into the ground every year—

and that a traditional cremation spews out carbon dioxide and even mercury into the atmosphere, the rest of us would do well to consider natural burial for carbon footprint-reducing reasons, if not for religious reasons. Since I have no children, the chaos of my own death could very well become the burden of someone I'm not even related to. I want to keep that burden as minimal as possible. I already created...

That was a preview of an excerpt from an essay from my new book, The Catastrophe Hour. That is the essay we'll be discussing in the next meeting of our book club, which runs for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, beginning on June 11th on Zoom from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern time. If you are hearing this, it means you are not yet a paying subscriber to this podcast. To join the book club, you will need to become one and you'll need to make sure you subscribe at the annual level.

You can join and upgrade your subscription at theunspeakablepodcast.com or megandom.substack.com. Those go to the same place. And you can buy The Catastrophe Hour and all of my other books wherever books are sold. I would love to see you in the book club. Thanks for listening.