I’m doing my bit to try to move us up in Google page ranking and list numbers re: Ken’s comment on my post today. This is Terra Naomi’s big hit.

Surely one of us must have posted this one already. Maybe while I was loaded on VICODIN.

First off, I’d like to apologize to all you Brainiacs for not meeting my posting commitment for the past month. I had a killer flu that lasted for more than three weeks. Work life was way beyond fast-paced, leaving me listless and stupefied by mid-afternoons. Then, last week I ramped up a monster ear infection, which caused frequent pain-bursts throughout the left side of my face. In case I haven’t mentioned it before – Vicodin is our buddy.

I feel much better now, so my thoughts have naturally turned, with assistance from some recent posts here, to one of my favorite subjects:

Death.

This isn’t morbidity on my part.

…..Well, okay, fine. Actually it is. I take my impending doom personally.

I’ve adopted the sensible attitude that dying should be viewed as a potentially curable medical condition. I figure I have about a 25% chance of living long enough for some of the good life-prolonging treatments to become available. If I can put off the not-inevitable for another 30 or 50 years, I hope to persist until lift-off of the Nanotech Singularity, with its promise of functional immortality. I’m up for stem-cell transplants, telomere replacement, mitochondrial rejuvenation, cellular-level repairs, and other unforeseeable scientific breakthroughs in support of my ambition to avoid Shuffling Off to Buffalo.

As a non-proselytizing atheist, though, I do still have to contemplate the fact that sometimes Bad Things Happen to Good Rories. However, I don’t have much mainstream cultural structure to fall back on to ease the transition from Me to Meat. Most religions give you, and your loved ones, hope of an afterlife, usually one that’s a big boring party where you don’t ever have to go back to work the next morning or worry about the cost of vehicle insurance.

I hate attending funerals, but I recognize that for most people, they’re rituals that allow you to say your (semi)-final farewells to people, until you get re-united inside the Giant Light Bulb. They also serve as ways of proclaiming greater meaning to people’s lives and deaths. I seem to be permanently mired in the Existential struggle, so the whole concept of funerals is damn cold comfort to me when I lose somebody, and useless as a concept if I personally check out of the Harper Hotel.

So, I’ve put some thought into what I’d like to happen, post-Rory.

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