I have a new life goal: I want to run for Coroner.

So.

Very.

Much.

Let me be clear here: I don’t want to actually BE coroner. Dead bodies are gross.

Live bodies are pretty gross for that matter.

I just want to run for the office of coroner. The running is the fun part!

Think about it: when you’re running for coroner, you’re urging people to let you mess with dead bodies. You’re trying to convince them that you’d be better at messing with dead bodies than that other guy who wants to mess with dead bodies. There is something beautifully strange about that.

I would love to take running for coroner to its logically twisted conclusion.

The speeches write themselves:

“I am the best person for this job, because I LOVE working on dead bodies. I have so much experience! In my spare time, I’m always going down to my basement to work on the bodies…well, maybe you don’t need to know about that.

“But the point is, with me as your coroner, I promise that there will be more dead-body handling than EVER before! I vow there won’t be a single dead body that these hands will not have touched!

“Most importantly of all, as coroner, I’ll finally have a large enough sample size to publish my study ‘Are Dead Bodies Ticklish?’

“So vote for me. You’ll sleep better at night knowing that, when you get brutally murdered, I’ll be the one who looks inside your stomach to see what you last ate.”

And then there’s the posters:

coroner poster

The only problem is if I somehow accidentally get elected. Then I’d be in trouble. I mean, I’ve got a liberal arts degree. It’s not restrictive like a degree in dentistry or something where you can only go into one career. My degree is broad, qualifying me for any sort of work, really.

So I certainly COULD be coroner.

But dead bodies make me uncomfortable. Cutting open dead bodies makes me pass out. (I suppose I can’t know that for certain until I do it, but I’m pretty certain that would be the outcome.) And, unlike air-traffic controllers, coroner is not a job you can do while you’re unconscious.

But I think my creativity will get me through. I won’t know what really killed people because I can’t cut them open.  But I can come up with some great causes of death that leave no big obvious markings.

Just off the top of my head:

-Drank so much coffee, he suffered internal drowning

-Got lemon juice in a paper cut (it IS that serious)

-Trampled in a fluffy puppy stampede (fluffy puppies leave no marks)

-Apparently he was NOT ready for some football

-Was a constant back-seat driver. His demise was inevitable.

-Spontaneously combusted, but only a little. Not so much that you’d notice.

-Visited a foreign country and didn’t know how to ask where the bathroom was

-Hit a squirrel with his car and then karma struck back, hard

-Couldn’t think of an end to her blog post and suffered a fatal dose of writer’s block