About Seven Lifetimes

Q: You know what I like about getting old?

A: Thus far, it still beats the alternative.

About a year ago, a good friend relayed his experience about turning...a certain landmark age. (That's as specific as I'm gonna get.) Suffice it to say I was "celebrating" a landmark year. He's a couple years ahead of me - so he'd already crossed that friggin moat.


He said that within a few weeks of hitting that age, three things happened to him:

1) His back went out on him and he was sprawled out for a week - unable to move, like he was in some sort of invisible traction.

2) He underwent his first root canal.

3) The optometrist told him he needed bifocals.

Oh yeah...did I say "three" things? There was a fourth: a doctor deflowered him with a long, greasy, inquiring finger.

I laughed my arse off at the time...then spent the next few weeks worrying about the karmic repercussions of my belly-busting guffaw. And then I forgot all about it.

Funny thing about karma: it doesn't care about time...it could be instantaneous (I guess that's "instant karma") or 218 lifetimes from now. Infinity is all-encompassing and is therefore outside the realm of time and space (I think). In this instance, karma caught up with me about 10 months later.

Last week, to be exact.

I'm about 2 months shy of one year past the aforementioned landmark. And last week, without any (known) singular catastrophic precipitating event, my back freaked-out (as the docs these days like to refer to it). This provided me and Sweetness (run, Lola, run!) a glimpse of the glorious future. I was a whining, creaking, groaning, bent old man for several days. In case you've never experienced debilitating back pain, let me explain something about anatomy: the back is connected to everything. I drive a manual 5-speed and I couldn't shift that sucker without a great deal of pain racing through my whole body. For fuck's sake, just sucking in a deep breath hurt like hell.

The doc kinda fixed me up: even though I am nowhere near 100%, I am at least not in constant pain.

A co-worker, empathizing with me in his own odd way, said something at the proverbial water cooler that stuck with me. "It's such a relief to know that we are gonna die!" he said. Dude is still in his mid-twenties.

So on the one hand, death probably seems far off and fantastical to him. But on the other, how can you be that young and already have experienced enough life to think that death is the existential Tylenol for this angst-riddled veil of tears? Death as something to look forward to? And it's not like he's a Mormon or anything - with his own universe to look forward to lording over. He's not religous and doesn't believe in any kind of afterlife. He has a great job, a great wife and is as healthy as a California wildfire. No addictions...no major demons. None of that torturous crap. It was odd. Yet awfully prescient and wise, too.

Given the current limitations of science and the human body, I have no doubt that at some point in the next four or five decades, I will feel the same way.

But if we were able to age only, say, 15 current years for every 100, I think I could probably hang around in this incarnation - on this wonderfully strange and occasionally infuriating blue water sphere - for five or six hundred years before I got tired of it. Hell, I could live in different countries and continents, move every 20 or 30 years and start a whole new career each time. Sign me up for that gig! I dig life - even with the aches and pains (physical and otherwise) - a heckuva lot more often than not.

The only stickler to living that long is the whole monogomy/marriage thing. How would that work? (Sweetness?) We love each other as much as any couple, I believe - and we have a pretty darn healthy relationship that encourages each of us to live and be our best...but four or five centuries? I doubt she'd put up with me for that long.

But if everyone lived to be 500 or 600 years old, maybe you'd only be able to get marriage licenses in like, 25-year increments: 25, 50, 75 or 100 year marriage licenses...with an option to renew, of course.

Whatever. Even if I haven't worked out all the kinks to living for half a millenia, I'd still take the deal. And really, if Sweetness were part of the deal, I'd take that in a heartbeat! (With asterisks, fine print, and parenthetical options, of course.)