Читать книгу The Columns (Volume One) - Tracy Lorenz - Страница 4

By Tracy K. Lorenz

I don’t often ask favors in this column but I’m about to now: I would respectfully request that people on or about my age quit dying; it’s freaking me out. Okay, Michael Jackson was 80% plastic and had more drugs in him than the front row of a Grateful Dead concert, and Billy Mays had a heart the size of a pumpkin, but they were still approximately my age and they still approximately keeled. I don’t remember that happening when I was ten.

This is how I saw my future unfolding. I’m the last of the “baby boom” generation. I figured all of the boomers ahead of me would be busting their butts curing everything so by the time I sauntered into middle age there’d be some gigantic Dick Clark miracle pill I could take so I could still leg out an infield hit when I was 75. Apparently that isn’t in the works so I probably better go with plan B.

THERE IS NO PLAN B!

All the money that’s been donated to health related research doesn’t appear to be doing any good. My great grandma lived to be 90-something and was still shoveling her own driveway when she was 88. My one grandma made it to 85 and the only time she put down her bottle of Drewry’s was to light a cigarette.

My other grandma planned on dying from the moment I met her. When my brothers and I were little and she was babysitting, she’d tell us what song she wanted played at her funeral and what bible verse she wanted read. She’d tell us how she wanted to be buried on the old family farm next to the chicken coop and at the time she was, like, fifty. She lived to be 86.

So nowadays we have MRI ’s, laser surgery, chemo-therapy, and 3-D diagnostics. An entire hill in Grand Rapids is dedicated to helping us live longer. People are eating better, they quit smoking, they exercise and if they’re really lucky they’ll live to be 86 or 88 or 90. It seems like we’re moving all the pieces around but the end result is the same. The human race is just a giant version of the Detroit Lions offense.

Death is a little different now than it was even thirty years ago because of the Internet. I have exactly one picture of my grandma that I know of. It was taken at my First Communion party so it’s not exactly current (as an aside, my grandma saw that picture in a collage on her 80^th birthday and said, “I forgot how good looking I was!”).

But now with devices like Facebook and Youtube people can stay in our lives forever. I’m not sure there’s an expiration date on Myspace or Google so presumably whatever makes it on the net will remain there for all eternity. If I croak and my son Q wants to read some of my old columns, they’ll all be out there, waiting.

But that doesn’t do ME any good. He’ll be reading about flip-flops while I’m dodging worms. So here’s what I’m thinking. Supposedly every person (every living thing actually) has a unique electrical current running through their body. When displayed on a screen, the current is as individual as a voiceprint. What if I figure out a way to capture and store those internal electrical blips on a computer? Maybe someday, someone smarter than me will be able to take the blips and play them back like a record, decoding the series of irregular lines and recreating the person who made them, electronically at least. You could carry your relatives around on a flash drive. We have paperless companies, why not bodyless people?

The cool thing is you could keep updating it so your kid could have “Dad at thirty” and “Dad at forty” so conversations could be held electronically with no mental deterioration. When you’re twenty-five, you can talk to your Dad who’s also twenty-five.

I admit it’s got some bugs to be worked out but hey, they laughed at the guy who invented penicillin. When Marconi talked about harnessing radio waves people thought he was nuts and 100 years ago who would have dreamed of the designated hitter? Storing a body’s electrical rhythm is certainly easier and less expensive than cryogenically freezing a head (and considerably less messy).

Now if I could just get all those people who donate millions of dollars towards curing diseases which we will obviously never cure to send me the money for Tracy-wave Technology™ research, I’ll be golden. Not only will I be rich I’ll be able to live forever and as living options go, when it comes to forever you just can’t…beat it.