Sirte in Autumn

I haven't quite decided how I'd like to go out yet, but I'm less and less sure I'm actually going to have a choice. I have most of the obvious preferences: sacrificing myself to save a child, heart attack accepting my Nobel Prize for Blogging, extreme sexual exhaustion, death by Death By Chocolate, etc. Nothing lingering, nothing painful, nothing unduly embarrassing. Erotic asphyxiation is fine so long as it isn't the auto variety, for example. I'd hate to shuffle off, as it were, with people thinking I didn't have to foresight to employ a spotter.

The older I get, the more I realize "how would you prefer to die?" is a young man's game. The more I see, the more I realize every year we gain comes at the cost of ceding a little bit more control over the circumstances of the Last Transition. Sure, you get rare cases like Hunter S. Thompson who had that rare triangulation of foreknowledge, the courage of his convictions and a support system to make his ending exactly what he wanted it to be. For most of us with the misfortune of being born into a country without a crippling social expectation of elder care on firstborn sons, the end looks a lot more like tapioca and expressive aphasia. As if we needed another reason to envy the Chinese.

Managing the bit between the decline in professional or cultural productivity and El Siesta Grande seems to be the trickiest part. Nobody seems to get it quite right. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between professional success and poetry or grace at the inevitable setting of the sun. It doesn't matter how many touchdown passes you throw or Super Bowls you win, almost win or almost get to: at some point, before you realize it, you're a dithering, malingering liability sending cellphone pictures of your junk to women half your age who--and this is the worst part--don't even want them. It doesn't matter how many billions of dollars you extort by strip-mining your country's only natural resource or how many civilian passenger aicraft you blow up, at some point down the line, some mob out there is going to strap you to the hood of a car and lynch you. Every peak is just a waystation between two steep-ass valleys. Plateaus are shimmery mirages in the minds of psychopaths and socialists. It seems like the humiliation of the end is somehow karmically calculated as the inverse of your level of achievement. It sounds like a harsh concept, but without it, we'd have no reality television.

It's not that I think we can't do it right, I just think we don't have a lot of practice. "Retirement" is a phenomenon dreamed up in the very recent past. It's born out of the same pinko thinking in the late 19th/early 20th century that brought you trade unions, the 40-hour work week, child labor laws and the New Deal. How many people "retired" before 1932? How many farmers? How many steel mill workers? How many coal miners? And of those, the ones who stopped working usually only did so because the stroke made it tricky to operate the combine. And that period of not-working is what we today know as "hospice care."

No, retirement is a thoroughly modern idea. Like space flight, it's only possible--conceivable even--with a hefty state subsidy, except for the inconceivably wealthy. But we know from my inverse karma algebra equation thingy from before, there are no guarantees of quality there either.

I guess we only have two options as I see it if we want to get off this train with some kind of dignity intact. 1) Obviously, be inconceivably wealthy. Again, not a guarantee that it will be good, but between the hangers-on and the house staff, the odds of your corpse ending up locked in a room, undiscovered, with an otherwise unfed dog for a week or more is as close to minuscule as you're likely to get it. Or 2) Stay off the radar. There's clearly lots of incentive here not to do anything of note. Medical science being what it is, statistically speaking, we're all going to outlive our sell-by dates. The precipitousness of our individual falls will depend upon the height we're standing when we reach that tipping point. Neil Young said it's better to burn out than to fade away. I'm not so sure. That's the kind of thinking that made Kurt Cobain discharge a shotgun into his own face.