what's gonna happen to me in the future?

Four questions are most important in this life:

1. Who am I?
2. Why am I here?
3. Where am I going?
4. Where's the remote?

All four, as you can probably tell, are intertwined. Your identity, your purpose, your destiny, and your happiness--to examine one is to examine all.

So let's look at question three. Let's define your future.

In about five minutes you will think Yes, yes, this is true. This is the truest truth. And somehow I have known it all along. You always lie to yourself like that.

In about six hours your eyelids will droop, your limbs will sag, and you will sink into a cheap sofa in front of a television set. You will take a piece of paper and stick it to the screen, marveling at the adhesive power of static electricity. You will be drunk. Or stoned. Or both.

In about one week your free lottery coupon will arrive in the mail, in between several junk fliers from Wal-Mart which you will barely scan before tossing into the garbage, along with the ticket. (You wouldn't have won anyway.)

In about three months you will have a spiritual epiphany in a dream, suddenly understanding all the mysteries of the divine and the sublimities of the human experience, and how they are somehow connected to a handheld infrared device that controls a talking picture box. Your insight will be forgotten when you awake to your FM radio alarm, for Styx erases epiphanies on contact.

In about six years you will be officially disowned by a society that has crumbled into nothingness. This will not distress you.

In about four centuries you will ride out time in your lead-lined coffin until dug up and worshiped by genetic mutants, the only survivors after the inevitable biochemical apocalypse. You will not mind being worshiped. You're dead, after all.

In about eight millennia every last particle of your body will have been digested by the cosmos.





[sixty-sixth in a series]