Dead Facebook Friends

I have Facebook friends who have died. Actually, in reality died. Dead Facebook friends whose icons still stare at me from the screen from time to time when the system mysteriously dredges them up to float there, reminding me. I suppose a lot of people here have dead Facebook friends. If you defriend them, they'd haunt you in other ways if there were such things as ghosts.

Marley, a famous ghost from fiction (psst! The only kind).

My dad, who is also dead, had this to say about ghosts--we were sitting in the forest in the mountains of north Georgia just looking at the trees. And he suddenly said:

"You know how I know that there's no such things as ghosts?"

Since I was twelve at that point and had not believed in gods or the supernatural since I was eight years old, I already didn't believe in ghosts. But my dad was sharp and almost always had something interesting to say, so I bit.

"Nope. Why?" I asked.

Then he swept his arm to indicate the forest all around us growing on the steep Appalachian hillsides that had once been part of a vast Indian Nation but which (at least this 120 acres on which we sat) now belonged to him.

"Because this was once all Indian land, before we slaughtered them all. If there were such a thing as ghosts, they'd rise up from here and kill every fucking white man around."