I used to say that my goal was to live to 140. I have confidence that medical science can improve enough to make that happen. People tell me that it’s a stupid goal because no one wants to be old and decrepit. These naysayers are forgetting about the likely breakthroughs in mood enhancing drugs. The best mood enhancers available today either have horrible side effects or they’re illegal or both. But over the next thirty years or so, I expect those problems to be solved. When I’m 120 I’ll be grinning from ear to ear and so “vital” that my pants will need orange warning cones around them.
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That was my goal. But lately I’m thinking it’s too conservative. If you’ve been watching the news, you know there’s reason to think that gene therapy and the like will be able to keep wealthy cartoonists alive for hundreds of years.
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There’s one wrinkle in this plan. I just visited my parents in Florida and I noticed that they are shrinking as they age. My dad has lost about 4-inches so far, with no end in sight. This suggests a more realistic goal. My new plan is to live long enough to slowly disappear. It will be a lengthy process, I hope, but within the next five or six hundred years, I hope to fit inside a matchbox and have a pet beetle named Skippy.
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I’ll still travel the world, probably from inside the shirt pocket of my faithful servants Mandrake 1 through 47. I’ll instruct each Mandrake to cut a hole in his shirt pocket so that it lines up with the picture window on my matchbox home. From there I will run my Dilbert empire and make blog entries until I shrink to the size of a neutrino and fall into the center of the earth to live for eternity in the molten core.
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Unless I forget to feed my pet beetle Skippy and he eats me. Then I will become beetle poop and forever be the punchline in a cruel Yoko Ono joke.
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That’s my plan. Let me know if you see any flaws in it.
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And someday I plan to learn how to make this blog software publish in a format that has some resemblance to the way I type it in. Until then I will add little dots to force the paragraphs from bunching onto each other.