Waiting

You know that feeling when you’re waiting for something? You know it’s coming, but you don’t know when.

Multiply that by a billion and you’ve got something approaching the response to a terminal illness diagnosis. The doctors may give you a prognosis, but it’s vague, and could be way off.

Unless you’re actually in your deathbed … and why is it always a bed? Why not a death chair? Or sitting at a death table? What happens if you’re in the bathroom, on the death toilet, when that final moment comes?

Can you manage it so you die in a dignified manner? You don’t want to be discovered on the bathroom floor with your pants half down. Someone should make a device that pulls up your pants if you fall off the seat. Is that so much to ask?

Or maybe it’s not that sudden. Maybe you get a chance to pull your pants up when the grim reaper approaches. You should be able to sign up for text message alerts. Of course then you’ll start getting tons of casket ads in your Facebook feed.

And what about that final Tweet or Facebook post? That’s kind of like what last words used to be. People attach some great significance to last words, as though a dying person suddenly understands and can sum up the secrets of the universe in 280 characters or less.

“Moving 2 the light its beautiful had breakfast burrito today”

And there’s the whole nagging uncertainty about when to start something. Unless you’re a great writer or composer or mathematician, you don’t want to leave some unfinished work lying around. I mean, Mozart left a requiem for someone else to finish, and Dickens left The Mystery of Edwin Drood unsolved. Mathematicians spent over 300 years trying to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem because he left a note in the margin that said “There’s a nifty proof of this.” Whole new branches of mathematics were invented in trying to come up with the proof (which someone finally did.)

But it doesn’t seem likely that anyone will spend that kind of time on an unfinished blog post.

Anyway, that’s the kind of crap I think about while waiting.