LIFE'S A BITCH AND THEN YOU DIE--a saying found on T-shirts and bumper stickers everywhere. But such is not the case for Seattle. Here, life is rich and then you vanish. You are "disappeared," as they used to call it in Argentina, except this time it's not a dictator or a death squad who disappears you but a highly mechanized capitalist process that removes all traces of your remains from the surface of the visible city. You will not see death in Seattle; you can walk the streets for days and nights, look in alleys, homes, and sports stadiums, and not find it. Yet people are dying all the time--an average of around 450 per month according to the King County health department, which is basically an entire small town (baker, butcher, drinking buddy), perpetually vanishing into thin air.

The dead are everywhere, yet nowhere. They don't haunt us, come back to life, or weigh heavily on our thoughts, reminding us of their past, of their time in the sun. Indeed, no writer in Seattle could produce a story like James Joyce's The Dead (which concerns a young Dubliner's profound awareness of the dead and how they invade, oppress, and dissolve the "solid world"), because here, there is only one-way traffic between the vast region of the shadows and the land of the living. This is not a ghost town! We do not care to remember our dear and beloved ones. Once you are gone, once you are out of sight, you are out of mind.

The reason Seattle determinedly rejects the dead is because they represent our negative city, the city whose signs, codes, and modes are directly opposed to the positive city, which is young, prosperous, optimistic, and futuristic. In fact, let's not call it a negative city, which is really Matthew Stadler's term for an "unbuilt city" (meaning city parks and buildings that were planned but never constructed), but instead borrow and slightly bend Julia Kristeva's term "abject," which she described as that which "upsets, disturbs, or undermines some established order or stable position." This is what the abject city does; it "disturbs identities, systems, and orders" and brazenly mocks our rules, financial gains, and aspirations of becoming a world-class city. The abject city (with its mad laughter) always brings us down, spoils the fun. Yes, death is a real party pooper.

With all of this in mind, The Stranger's death issue offers the reader two things: one, a sober account and recognition of Seattle's abject city, and the machine or industry that keeps it at bay. Two, solutions to everyday problems, such as how one may dispose of a dead person as quickly and effectively as possible, so that you may continue to maintain peace of mind during these booming times. We hope this death issue is both edifying and useful.