Diamonds are forever

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/07/2017 (3279 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Welcome to July 31, the 212th day of the year, the fourth day of the Canada Summer Games and, more importantly, the final day before we kick off the blistering month of August.

In a celebration to welcome the last meteorological month of summer, on this day, every year, I like to kick back, crack open a cold adult beverage, crank up my stereo system to the volume of a nuclear blast and play one of my all-time favourite summer albums.

Anyone my age with any musical taste whatsoever will know I am referring here to legendary singer-songwriter Neil Diamond’s classic vocal masterpiece, Hot August Night, the live double album he recorded on Aug. 24, 1972 at a sold-out show in the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles.

For all you Gen Xers and millennials, this is the album wherein this musical genius sweats profusely and performs the smash hit I am, I said, in which he plaintively croaks the following life-changing lyrics: “I am … I said/To no one there/And no one heard at all/Not even the chair.”

Yes, you heard that correctly, young people. Diamond bares his soul in these heart-felt lyrics and his cries go unheard — even by his beloved chair. Depending on whether you spend a great deal of time in conversation with your furniture, you will no doubt agree that is one of the most emotional and deeply troubling lyrics in the history of modern music.

But that is not today’s point. No, today’s point has nothing to do with whether Neil Diamond’s chair has ears and is even remotely interested in whatever he is singing. Today’s point is that I was randomly Googling Diamond’s iconic name to find out what the 76-year-old singer has been up to lately — it turns out he is in the middle of his 50th anniversary tour — and stumbled on groundbreaking news reports about an entirely different kind of diamond.

According to these upbeat reports, anyone who is thinking about being dead in the near future can now spend the rest of eternity as one of the most precious commodities on Earth, by which I mean an actual diamond.

It seems when you shuffle off this mortal coil, a Swiss company called Algordanza, for prices starting at $3,000, will convert your earthly remains (or those of your beloved pet) into the hardest substance in the world, namely a sparkly diamond.

“It allows someone to keep their loved one with them forever,” Christina Martoia, a spokeswoman in the United States for Algordanza, told BusinessInsider.com. “We’re bringing joy out of something that is, for a lot of people, a lot of pain.”

From what I read and partially understood, the company takes the ashes of you or your pet, extracts the carbon, from which diamonds are made, and gets rid of any potential contaminants, such as salt, before converting the carbon into slippery sheets of graphite, kind of like in a pencil or a golf club.

Then they stick whatever is left of you into a special machine and subject it to extremely high heat and pressure to transform your icky remains into something more valuable.

“That machine can heat a growth cell to nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit,” according to BusinessInsider.com. “It also squeezes the cell under 870,000 pounds per square inch of pressure.

“That’s like the entire mass of the International Space Station bearing down on the face of a wristwatch — then heating it up to a temperature exceeding that of lava.”

The end result is — POOF! — you’re a (bad word) diamond!

Of course, there are options. According to other reports I am holding in my hands, there is a company called Holy Smoke, which, for a small fee, will load your remains into a case of 250 shotgun shells so that your bereaved family and friends can use you to kill other things that are currently alive.

Or, like the family of the late actor James Doohan, who played Scotty in the original Star Trek shows and movies, you can pay a company called Celestis to stuff you into a shiny canister the size of a tube of lipstick and launch your leftovers into orbit.

You can also pay a company named Carbon Copies to put your remains into the lead of a set of pencils. They can make a set of about 240 pencils from your standard pile of human carbon, and each pencil is stamped with the name of the loved one.

How about being turned into teddy bear stuffing? According to news reports, the Huggables Collection can ensure whatever is left of you is stuffed inside a cuddly teddy bear, because traditional urns just aren’t cute enough for the likes of you.

And there’s always the option of paying a company named Eternal Ascent to place your remains inside a helium balloon, which will then float into the upper atmosphere, where it will crystallize and burst, scattering you to the four winds.

As for me, I had always assumed that when I depart this veil of tears, my loved ones will stuff my ashes inside one of those hand-held hotdog cannons they use at football games, then during halftime fire me up into the crowd where, with any luck, I will get stuck in the eye of some (bad word) Saskatchewan Roughriders fan.

But I’ve changed my mind. Now I want to be a diamond, and not of the singing variety. The main benefits of spending eternity as a gemstone include:

1) You will be a symbol of eternal, undying love;

2) For the first time in your life (make that death) you will be irresistible to persons of the extreme opposite sex;

3) You will become the hardest substance in the world, with the ability to cut anything. Meaning you will finally be considered the sharpest knife in the drawer, metaphorically speaking.

Call me crazy, but I am now dying to be a synthesized, formerly human, non-singing diamond. And I couldn’t care less who knows it. Including the chair.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca