** When you were a kid **

When you were a kid, did you ever think that you might die before you reached adulthood? Did you ever secretly wish you would? Not that you had a death wish . . . but just that maybe you might die before you had to deal with it? Because it was so scary, so foreign, so uncomprehisible to you, that you actually feared growing up?

Bills, wives, children, work . . . oh God, WORK! Save me!

I did. I used to think i'd only live to 33. Actually i secretly hoped i'd only live to 33. Not that i'd ever take my own life, i'm Catholic. We can't do that. But i thought that my expectations would have influence over the events of my life, and that's just how it would turn out. I guess i could have "made" it turn out that way. But as the years went on and on and on . . . it got easier and easier. Life was something that just came; day to day. It happened, we dealt with it.

"They" tell you it gets easier, "they" tell you it gets better. But you don't see it until it happens to you. And you really don't see it until you've already seen it. It's wierd.

Now i want to live forever. I want to live until i'm 1,852 years old. I want to see civilization destroy itself. I want to watch everyone i know die. I want to witness the extinction of the squirrel. I want to be the last person on the planet, with a broken pair of specs and a library of books . . . dented cans of Campbell's beans and no plastic sporks . . . barrels of inert petrol . . . thousands of DVD's with no TV's to watch them on . . . hundreds of roller-coasters with no one to operate them . . . trillions of stars to sleep under, with no one to point them out to.

One of the damned. That would be my heaven, that would be my hell. But it would be mine.

What did you think your life would be like . . .
. . . when you were a kid?

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