Wizened Man

My brain operates a little like a computer. No, wait. Computers operate a little like my brain, since my brain was here first. ENIAC was rolled out in 1946, a year after I rolled out, so I'll claim some credit as the inspiration for the electric brain.

Anyway, at any given time I have three or four or fifteen threads of thought whirling in my head; multitasking is what we call it. One thread that runs pretty much continuously someplace in the back of my mind is what the heck am I going to do with the rest of my life? The whole idea of rest of my life is sort of new to me; my favorite imaginary teeshirt says "So far I'm immortal". I once considered life to be infinite, and suddenly I'm not so sure about that.

But if not infinite, life's length certainly is uncertain. That makes retirement planning very difficult, both in finances and opportunities. When to take that trip to Paris, the Alaska cruise, the South Pole trek? How to spend the nest egg: scrambled, fried or slowly slowly poached? It's a problem, and it's consuming a chunk of processing power in my little brain and likely the brains of other upper middle agers.

Wouldn't it be nice to know the time of our departure, to have it posted on a monitor like they do at the airport? Fred Wilson...departing 4/13/2025 ... on schedule. That would work for me. I could get my ducks in a row, blow through as much of my kid's inheritance as possible, tell some people what I really think of them, and have my best suit cleaned and pressed. How civilized it would be, and how simple it would make life, if we could know beforehand when our clock would tick its last tock.

So then I start to think about this little wizened man in rumpled clothes, likely of gypsy stock, who wanders town to town selling slips of paper to the gullible and the curious, promising for a pittance that one secret we'd all (secretly) like to know. How well would his business thrive? How many would buy that slip of paper? How many would unfold it?

I like to think that I'm the type who would want to know when I was leaving so that I could plan a party for the day before. I don't worry much about dying because I feel like I've done enough with life already. My list of to do's is nearly complete: restored a '60 Buick, built some boats, raised some kids, painted the house...

I don't waste much time crying over others who leave the world with lives fulfilled, and I doubt that I'd want many tears shed on my behalf. Books end, songs end, lives end. The difference is that in life, we don't see that last page coming until it's way too late to make other plans.

Where's that little wizened man?