And make sure you play Bach at the wake.

Holy shite, I just noticed: CONSUMPTION! Now THAT'S old school Fish.
However, you're in good company...Beethoven died of "consumption" as well as many others--some famous--but I don't feel like doing research. Let's just put you in ol' Ludwig Van's company and call it a day.

auf!

Someone asked me how I was going to die the other day. I said I don't know, but I bet there's a lot of cops around.

Consumption's not very sexy. It makes me think of Doc Holiday, lying in bed with his boots on, surround by his own mucus. How about this for an old timey disease?
MARASMUS: Progressive wasting away of body, like malnutrition

Best old-timey death ever: the composer Lully. Died of a stubbed toe aquired while conducting a concert celebrating the successful rectal surgery of his patron.

http://www.dsokids.com/2001/dso.asp?PageID=406

and the keening--don't forget the keening!

A nice violin solo would fit in there nicely.

I intend to die in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming and burning like his passengers.

(rim shot)

I want a short, old-school Presbyterian funeral, with a bagpiper playing "Amazing Grace."

And then I want a wake befitting the level of joy, or at least entertainment, I've tried to bring to other people's dreary lives. I mean, kegs, a good blues band, firearms & explosions, startled livestock, multiple arrests, the whole nine yards. Keening mandatory. Rending of garments mandatory for those entering the hot tub.

Also, Doc Holliday HAD consumption, but I don't think he died of it. And whatever he died of, he lived to a ripe old age first.

Nah, iocane poisoning looks cooler:

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha" *bonk*

INCONCEIVABLE!

Please stop using that word! I do not think it means what you think it means.

BLUSH??
eww....

Note to Fish: Two boring things to write about... 1) How often you are getting it. 2) Being overly dramatic about having the flu.

Note to Mar: Get some.

My boyfriend's brother has the whooping cough. Swear to g-d. I was talking to a friend of mine this morning on the F train - she mentioned that she had had scarlet fever as a young child. So consumption? Why not!
Feel better!

Am I too late for the Princess Bride quotes?

Stop those rhymes now, I mean it!
Anybody got a peanut?

Not funny.

You are just some crazy cats. Love and a runny nose. If it meant contracting consumption to find love (didn't someone write a novel with that theme) then I say let the lung hacking begin!

Crap. I just coughed. I was totally being sarcastic. Seriously. At least let me get "some" first cruel fates.

Whooping Cough (Pertussis) is horrible! Give me a loaded .44, a bottle of gin, and my life's possesions which will all be put on "red" for a one-time spin of the roulette wheel a la that English freak who actually did this and won.

I don't want any kind of fuss over my death. I'm with Hemingway: "he died like every other man; and then he was dead."

I don't know what consumption is, but I *have* heard the Monty Python song "Decomposing Composers." Classic.

My dear friend and cousin, 34, died on December 15, 2004 after a 2.5 year battle with breast cancer that spread before it was caught. She got married 2 months after her diagnosis. Nothing the least bit funny about losing someone so special and loved (she had the gift of true insight combined with tact that she shared with her friends, family and patients (she was a psychologist and most of her patients were young women/teenage girls). The way she died was incredibly cruel as well - she was the picture of health and wasted away in incredible pain.