David Erik Nelson, Editor, PMjA: "If I am non-responsive to a direct request after the third repetition, feel free to pull the plug. I don't care if I'm in a persistent vegetative state, or in the shower, or watching TV, or whatever. If you ask three times, and I don't even grunt or say 'gimme a sec.,' then yank it. Seriously."

Erik Garner Warren, Editor-at-Large, PMjA: "My corpse is to be maintained, living and breathing, at any and all possible expense in perpetuity. Furthermore, I'm more than happy to shove my 'feeding tube' down the throat of any man, woman or child who I can pin down long enough for the insertion. Fuck Congress and the Supreme Court; I'll do it with my own two hands."

Morgan Johnson, Editor, PMjA: "If I ever fall into a persistent vegetative state, I want to be either: a) put into a deep space probe and sent outside the Oort cloud; b) revived by whatever witchdoctor, shaman, priestess or cultist that is available, while making abso-fucking-lutely clear that doctors can stay the fuck away from me; c) experimented upon by the army to create the first Zombie Super-Soldier who will then bring about the Zombocalypse; d) have my brain removed and inserted in a robot body, a la the Doom Patrol's Cliff Steele; or, e) unplugged, then stuffed and mounted by illegal Canadian taxidermists and passed around by all of my surviving relatives like the unholiest Hot Potato until my glass eyes fall out and my seams split sometime around 2098."

Molly Reynolds, Intern to the Giant Squid; Vice-President of the United States of America: "She died from puking up dinner too often. She had to be brain dead to be bulimic in the first place. I'm sick of this pretty-girl victimology shit. My nieces don't need to hear about all of this, to think about all of this, to have all of this unbelievable shit weighing on their minds. Our entire nation, dancing on the head of an angel, wondering who is right, who is wrong, who should have power of attorney, what right congress has in all of this. My youngest niece is nine, and she looked at her butt in the mirror in the hallway of my house last summer. A nine year old, and she was wondering about the size of her ass. Terry Schiavo was murdered by a Cosmo-induced potassium deficiency fifteen fucking years ago, and we are all worried about feeding tubes and writing fucking living wills! How self-centered of a nation can we be? How much farther up our own asses can we get? Did anyone in this fucking country think, 'Maybe we should have given that lady a fucking banana fifteen years ago?' 300 million fucking people, I can't even think straight, and no body could get off their asses and give a dying woman a goddamn banana!? Potassium Deficiency!? And you are asking me what I want in my fucking living will? Cosmo killed that woman! My niece is looking at her ass, with a man's eyes she is looking, and all I can think is, 'Honey, nothing like this even remotely matters! And if it did, one banana wouldn't hurt.' Oh god, please just eat the fucking banana! That's Christmas, birthdays, Easter, Fourth of July... from now until the end of time... Fresh fruit please. Everybody. Get fresh fruit, share your fresh fruit, stop looking at your asses, at each other's asses, at the asses of celebrities and thin fucking British princesses... because your sick fucking ideas are spreading around. It's like if one guy on the street looks up into the air, then two guys look, then gridlock in downtown Manhattan because everybody is searching the fucking sky. Christ I can't see straight. And now my niece wants a two-piece bathing suit, and my brother can't, for the life of him, imagine where a nine year old gets the idea she needs a two-piece bathing suit. But if everyone is looking at her ass, she starts looking at her ass, and she wonders, 'If I eat one less banana today, will my ass be what they want it to look like?' Oh God. Talk about a Vegetative State. If only this state were a little more god-damn vegetative. Get out of here. Get out of my face."

Rob Miller, Assistant to the Giant Squid: "A persistent what?"

George Double-Yew Bush, Advisor to the Giant Squid: "It's, ah, incumbent that all Americans be sure that they have arranged, properly arranged with . . . with their loved ones in what should they do if they . . . if the Americans— It's incumbent on all Americans to be sure that they have made clear to their loved ones the corse of action they themselves prefer in the case of their entering into a permanent vegetable state. Do the Living Will. Make the Power of Attorney."

the Giant Squid, Editor-in-Chief, PMjA; President of the United States of America: "As your Head-of-the-State, were I to enter a state of permanent vegetation, then would it not by my Body, the nation, which would wither? Denied my Head— which in this example is also some form of Spiritual Teat— would not you all then need to be equipped with the Tubes of Feeding? Would forcing you to persist, Headless and Disteated, be humane? Or of the greatest interest? Perhaps, in your foodless withering you would gracefully slump into beauteous modes of repose, revealing to the world the completeness of the uncarved stone, a beauty-of-shabby-things previously unseen, and certainly never before dreamed by your crass species of textile-monkeys and grunt-chimps, strutting and fretting your hour upon the stage, yet signifying nothing. Perhaps your Creator God, Mr. Darwin Evolution, is a sort of Albrecht Speer of the Soul. Besides, is this question still reasonably mooted? Is it not clear that I am a deathless thing?"

Fritz Swanson, Editor, PMjA: "I haven't got a funny thing to say about this. Please keep me alive."