More jabbering about life, death, and all that jazz
by Scott McNutt
Lately, life's been good, and I've been happy. Fortunately, I just turned 40. That's a happy coincidence, since turning 40 is widely felt to be an annoying thing, and this column is supposed to be a forum to snarl about annoying things, not to wax lyrical on how sweet life is. Plus, upon attaining the fortieth birthday, we columnists are compelled to write about the event. The impulse is irresistible. It's as instinctive as a week-old pup seeking his mother's nipple and as natural a part of the aging process as developing varicose veins.
So this is my column on turning 40.
That is, this would be my column on turning 40 if there were anything to say about it. But there isn't. It was a non-event. I feel no different now than I did a week or a month ago. Nada, nothing.
My only concern about turning 40 is that I didn't plan for it. I thought I was part of the "live-fast-die-young-leave-a-good-looking corpse" set. But I just never could live fast enough. I was always an underachiever.
And now it's too late for me. All I can leave is a flabby bald corpse. What's the point of hurtling headlong to your destruction if you're just going to leave a cadaver reminiscent of George Costanza?
So, apparently, I'm stuck with living, but being 40's OK. It offers me all kinds of advantages. My constant talking to myself is chalked up to advanced age. I can pretend my hearing's gone if someone's conversation bores me. The half-full bottle of hairspray in the back of my bathroom cabinet is a lifetime supply. I can let my gut out now.
If there is a drawback to being 40, it's only that you are that much closer to dying. And really, that's the problem with living in general: Everybody who does it ends up dead.
Mind you, I'm not opposed to dying. Having lived this long by eating dead things, it seems only fair that something else live by feasting on my lifeless remains. It's the natural order of things, the great cycle of life. And I'm big on the great cycle of life. If you are like me (don't worry, you're not), and you don't believe in an afterlife and don't plan on procreating, that great cycle offers a unique prospect of immortality. Let me explain:
As we know from the notes we took in high school physics class, Sandra has a crush on Mark, and Debbie and Dan did "it" Saturday. Wait, those are the wrong notes. Here we are: As we know from high school physics class, because E=MC2, matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. So after the microbes have dug out the forks and knives and dug into your body for dinner, all the little bits of you will eventually be scattered and even more eventually will be absorbed by living organisms and reused. It's the mother of all recycling programs.
Which is just neat-o keen, if you think about it: You get buried; the worms eat you and excrete you, turning you into dirt; one day 500 years from now, the dirt gets disturbed during the building a hyper-condominium, and after a heavy rain some of your molecules get washed away from the construction site; from there they pass into a gutter, then into a creek, then into a river, and finally into the sea; there, a sea bass swallows one of them; the sea bass is soon snared by an Ultra Sport Automatic Fish HarvesterTM; the fish is then selected to be dinner for the 22nd President of the United Earth; the prez's digestive system does its thing on your molecule, and eventually a part of you ends up as a part of the most important guy in the world in 2503. Then he's assassinated and the whole process starts over again.
Of course that's far in the future. And while it's a great fate to look forward to, for the moment, I'm just relaxing, being 40, and looking back, speculating on what famous people's molecules currently make up my left earlobe. Life is good.
February 27, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 9
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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