Mind in the macabre

Perhaps it's the approach of Halloween, or perhaps it's because I was taking photos in a cemetery recently, but my mind misinterpreted a couple of things today in curiously macabre ways.

I was sitting at my neighborhood coffee shop overhearing snippets of a conversation between three middle-aged women when I thought I heard one of them say, "They invited us to suffer." Now we do get religious types at this coffee shop, so I think for a fleeting moment I must have connected her words with some Christian ritual, but then I realized she said, "They invited us to supper." (!)

The second instance was in glancing at a young woman in a grey sweatshirt. She looked young enough at first to be a high school student, but I think she was more likely in her twenties. Maybe that recent tragic incident in the Amish community was in the back of my mind (in which a man entered the school and shot some children and then himself), or any number of incidents like it, but I thought her shirt had on its chest, in bold black letters, the word "SHOOT." It was really "SHOOK." I have no idea what that means, must be a young person thing.

You may perhaps wonder why I was taking photos in a cemetery. I am one of those people who finds cemeteries, especially old ones, very attractive. The monuments, the history, the sense of repose, the beauty of the landscaping, the patterns in the placement of the markers, and perhaps even the sense of being among the ancestors, even when they're not my own, all attract me. So when I learned of an ATC swap (artist trading cards) with a cemetery theme, I jumped at the chance to participate. The photo above is one that I took for that swap.