I, as one member of the tremendous Twenty-Four-Gun-Salute team called Joy Riff-Raff of Connecticut, was inclined to view death, its concomitants and advocates, and the smell associated with death as vile, treacherous enemies likely to get you when you're in the rough, which is to say as we all in the Twenty-Four-Gun-Salute team Joy Riff-Raff of Connecticut were.
The story behind this may never be fully told, as there are many other stories which must be told first. It is even impossible to explain why we were in the rough, or what being in the rough really meant (in relation to diamonds? golfballs?). The number of other stories which must be told first is enormous, and the tale of death is trivial--trivial! to the point of needing only the words of skin flux to describe it.
So listen to the stories, which will skirt, of course, the story of our group and its name and its feelings about that big fiend, death.
The first story is about a bad man, Hubert. Hubert had some angina, left of pimple. Left of the pimple! we had noticed fifteen years ago at a cook-out, nude in the forest clearing, romantically unbangled, saying "There! There is the pimple we have known in our dreams. There!"
Hubert had been none too amused. At that point he had left our group. It was only through strangers, stranger upon loathsome stranger, that we heard now about his bit of angina, his modicum of death-palaver, his trifling bump-up against middling Señor Muerte of the "two-bit consumerism diversion habits."
Muriel, another bad person in another story, another ex-member, had just now involved her hair in some vats of true misery, lynched her own blueprint that way, yes, we had heard; this one, she had left us oh twenty years back in a season of no lack of flurries, flurry flurry here and flurry flurry from the top of your hairdo--note the connection! Muriel, shit in the greening wind of true romance, was mastering the art of noticing hair in the glass.
True Muriel!
Murphy, on the other hand, a good man in yet another story, didn't care. Murphy could sit fifty years on a fence balancing buns with a chest of fine dish-shaped muscles, full fifty years and still not sop up reindeer mufflings with that cowardly antenna you can sometimes see poking up out of the ears of folk too long sitting on fences, shiftier folk than Murphy, of course.... No, Murphy was God's own pip
You see, so far, about our group, through these stories: we have a varied group; in time we are varied; in allegiance to group and containment in group we are varied (Murphy at one end, Muriel and Hubert at the other); in readability our fortunes are varied, for some of us are settled and free (Murphy), regardless of vile existences matching their klutziness to our heat (Hubert and Muriel), while others (Hubert and Muriel) are prodded to unseeable acts (Hubert and Muriel) by the tiny of fault (Murphy) in order that the world as a whole, mysteriously and to the doom of the wrong (Hubert and Muriel), might prosper.
You can see, more importantly, that there are many stories to be told besides the story of our name and death-orientation and so on, a story others tell only through totally misguided but admittedly wonderfully herculean efforts. So watch, and listen, and soon you will grow the most magnificent pair of be-bop kaftans upon your twin bonces, causing the envy of all New York's effortless children, making the very sun turn a jewelly way.