As most people know, I am a little bit off. I like to do things such as browse Wikipedia, take on eating challenges, and eat disgusting cupcakes. I have another interest that I have actually never discussed on this blog before. Get ready to add another tally to my weird column.

When I was young, I learned about the saints. I just didn’t learn about who they were, I also learned about the process to become canonized as one. When educated on this long process, I became familiar with a concept called incorruptibility. To check the holiness of prospective saints, church officials would sometimes exhume the body and examine it to see if it had decomposed. If the body had not decayed, the person was said to be incorruptible. As a young kid, the thought of men digging up someone’s grave and opening up the coffin made an impression on me.

This impression has stayed with me throughout my life. While at first I felt a little disturbed about someone’s final resting place being disturbed, that feeling of uneasiness has actually turned to a mild fascination over the years. As my well-documented interest in cemeteries grew, so did my interest in the state of physical bodies after death. As I walk on the grounds of graveyards I constantly think about the caskets I am walking above of. What is the contents of those boxes? Corpses? Bones? Dust? A combination of the three?

When I watch the reruns of “Forensic Files” I am always intrigued when they exhume a body for evidence. The image of big machinery lifting a casket out of the earth is eerie but interesting. I always think about what must go through the DNA specialist’s mind when doing work on the remains. What about the horror of family members seeing a loved one ripped out of the ground? The other day I was watching an episode where they had to exhume a body in New Orleans. Because of the wet climate, the coffin had sunk in the middle but not at the end where the lady’s head was at. While everywhere from below the neck was gone, the head was intact. Remarkably, the head is what they needed to test.

To me, I have just always believed that once the casket is closed during the funeral service, it will stay that way for eternity. The physical contents will sit underground forever. Thus, when the very rare occurrence happens where a body is exhumed, it just seems very unnatural but also remarkable. It reminds me exactly of a time capsule that was never meant to be open.

I decided to write about this for tonight’s post when I did some reading on Abraham Lincoln yesterday evening. As a U.S. Presidents nerd combined with my interest in this blog topic, I became very interested when I learned that Abraham Lincoln’s body was exhumed. Needing to make sure that Chicago gangsters didn’t steal his corpse, Lincoln’s body was exhumed around 30 years after his assassination in 1901. What they found blew my mind…

When his casket was opened, an overpowering choking smell flowed out. However, Lincoln’s body was completely intact! His beard, hair, and mole all looked the same as it did three decades prior. I get a kick out of it though that his suit was covered in yellow mold and his gloves had completely rotted away. You could see red fragments mixed in with the mold. Do you know where those fragments came from? It was the remains from the American flag that he was buried in.

Whether for religious, DNA, historical, or identification purposes, I am a little drawn to the practice of exhuming bodies. While I hate to see the dead unearthed for no reason, if it is for a good/necessary cause I am going to pay attention. Don’t Blink.

Last night, Sidney and I sat down on the couch to watch a movie. Called “Wild Horses,” the film starred Robert Duvall and James Franco. I thought it was okay, Sidney couldn’t stay awake. But the movie itself is an afterthought in all of this.

During a scene at the start of the film when Robert Duvall rides his horse to the Texas/Mexico border to settle a disagreement, I suddenly had a vivid memory flood my head. I was taken back to when I was probably four or five years old at the most. I was underneath these old, green metal bleachers at a large field that sat between a middle school and an elementary school. I was playing underneath the bleachers by myself while my mom sat on one of the rows below me, watching my sister. The sights, sounds, and smells were all immediately brought back to me at that minute as I sat on the couch.

The funny thing is, I don’t think I had thought of that moment since when it actually happened over 20 years ago.

Now I know there must be a psychological term and explanation for this (besides a flashback) but I didn’t want to Google it and take away some of the luster of this blog post. To be completely honest, this has happened to me on multiple occasions in the past few years. I will be engaged in some normal activity when something is triggered in my brain and a completely random thought from a couple decades ago takes over.

Another example would be the transportation of my mind back to when I drank grape juice in my mom’s kitchen during a point in my toddler years. My focused self at work seemed to just float away and a scene from the past took over. Suddenly I could remember everything from the taste of the juice to the color of the plastic cup (red) to the design on the kitchen tiles. Again, I had never even scratched the surface of remembering this memory for years until it all came to me at once.

What I find fascinating about these random thoughts is that they come out of nowhere when I am fully conscious and seem to be triggered while I am engaged in meaningful activity. Why would a Robert Duvall movie take me back to playing under the bleachers in overgrown grass? Why would sitting in a meeting cause my brain to fetch a scene of me drinking grape juice?

I guess you could call these flashbacks but they aren’t really what I have understood flashbacks to be. I go from a non-stressful moment in the present to a non-stressful moment in the past. The moment in the past is the first time I ever remembered it since it had happened. It doesn’t necessarily weird me out, it just makes me think.

Does this ever happen to you? Mind you these thoughts always come when I am wide awake and take over my brain with vivid detail. I find this all very interesting and I am excited to see what insignificant moment of my past I get to experience next. Don’t Blink.