How to live a long time

Like some wise man once said, not me: Getting old is the only way there is of living a long time. And I want to live a long time. Gosh. The things that go on in this life, you just don’t want to miss what’s gonna happen next.

Even before I ascended to Aeolia, it already looked like I might live forever. It probably started even back before we retreated into the malls, with my Ellie feeding me this stuff they called co-enzyme Q10. I took some every day for years, along with garlic capsules and fish oil and suchlike. I also had this doctor, he told me I had to cut down on the red meat—give it up, even—and get my calorie intake down to 1,600 a day. An ideal diet if you wanted to live forever, which I didn’t necessarily. But I went ahead with it anyway. Just about starved my butt off for a while there. And I had to water my bourbon down till there was no way to tell it wasn’t tapwater, which it probably was when Ellie mixed it. Gosh. But I have to say I started feeling friskier than I had in years. In fact, it got to the point Ellie said she was thinking of taking me off the co-enzyme Q10 and maybe putting saltpeter in my porridge besides.

That was a few years before they started coming up with all this nanomedicine, and before you knew it I was getting a complete overhaul. I hardly got used to having my own computer, a PC, when next thing I know I had a trillion of them or so inside me. Computers, I mean. I hardly got used to having my own computer, a PC, when, next thing I know, I got a trillion of ’em or so inside of me. Do you know, I can remember when we first got telephones, in the little town I grew up in. Party lines, they were. … Yeah, yeah. I know—off on a tangent. My qubital editor is doing everything except actually beeping at me.

Before I knew it they told me my liver was as good as it was when I was a kid of 50, though what I needed with a liver I don’t know; locked up in the Mall with MOM and her Dolls (MOM), I couldn’t even get a real drink. Whatever. The medibots overhauled my tired old carcass till it was nearly good as new, and maybe better. Used to be about as busted up as your average rodeo rider. Little mishaps on the oil rigs, sometimes in bars. A car crash or two. One time Nance—that was my first wife—clobbered me, accidentally like, with a blunt object when I happened to be standing at the top of some stairs. You know the kind of thing.

Anyway, MOM took a real interest in my health, nearly as much as my Ellie ever did and, I’ll have to say, more than Nance. Every morning I got to have a nice chat with my toilet. Seems the old blood sugar levels are a mite elevated. Unlike my friggin’ spirits. Only the toilet doesn’t know that.

That toilet was smarter than some people I’ve known. At first I had a heck of a time using it, to tell the truth. Didn’t seem right.

So I’d get my ninety-day checkup. Some routine maintenance. All these little ’bots running around inside me, we had to change the oil, balance the tires. I don’t know what. They said they could keep me in a “perpetually high energy state.” Gosh. Just what I needed. Not. Darn it, who wants to be in any perpetual state? I’m kind of glad they’ve kept me from being dead, which is one kind of perpetual friggin’ state; but that didn’t mean I had to go around wound up like a cuckoo clock all the time.

This diet I was on, I passed these things that look like rabbit pellets—clean and dry and all the same so they didn’t look like crap at all. The toilet would check it out, and then tell me that my triglycerides and whatnot were all just jim dandy, and I’d say why shouldn’t they be? Seeing as how I hadn’t had a decent drink in longer than I could remember. Or a good steak.

Some wise man, I can’t remember who, said something to the effect that teetotallers didn’t live any longer than the rest of us; it only seemed longer.

(By the way, I see our friend Jack is taking a new interest in his health.)

leary@collinpiprell.com

Changing the past.

It’s logically impossible to change the past. Or so I’m told. But you think about it: here I am sending messages back to you nearly 50 years ago, and you’re reading them. Is this the same past where nobody ever got to read this stuff? I don’t think so.

My Ellie wants to add something here. She says that this past where you’re reading my blob must be the past that we had in the first place. So anything I’m adding to it isn’t really a change, since that’s the way things always were anyhow. … Ellie’s a friggin’ genius, at least compared to me. Darn it. But I have to say that doesn’t make any sense at all.

Not only that, Ellie says, but this isn’t a “blob,” it’s a blog. Whatever. (It’s nice to know my qubital editor missed that.)

But getting back to changing the past, how can that be? I’m going to be telling people about the really bad things that happened between ad 2007 and 2055, and that would mean none of it did any good at all. That Collin Piprell got his novels MOM and The Proteant Enigmass published, and one other that I can’t talk about yet—and I know they all did pretty well—and nobody took a lesson from this. What’s the point, then? The point of anything, I mean. Gosh.

Still, here I am, channeling qubital life from the middle of the Third Millennium, adding to an ever-growing pile of notes towards the chronicle of my second half century and beyond. (If you have a look at MOM, which was published in 2008, you’ll find a few sections from my book, which I’m calling Full of It. The story of my first 50 years was called Half Full, and some claimed that the title was the best part of it. Though I doubt they ever actually read the thing, so what did they know?)

Anyway, that's it for now. Never mind I'm nothing but a mess of qubital data, I still seem to get tired easier than I should. Seems habits die hard, even in this brave new world, this "Aeolia," I find myself living in. If living is what I'm really doing.