“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying.” – Woody Allen
Just ask Sue - Chicago is THE place for your old bones to spend eternity
It all began in one of those typical conversations with my lady, where we’re not exactly sure how this crazed topic came up, but we needed to follow it through to the conclusion anyway.
“What, you wouldn’t want to be buried in Chicago?” I asked.
“I figured if anybody you’d want to be buried in Scranton,” she told me, and that’s a reasonable assumption.
I can only assume this came up after spouting a saying I’ve kicked around for some time now, to measure something’s greatness:
“If I die today after (insert great thing here), just take me to the boneyard and put me in the ground. Tell my momma I love her, tell her I did my best.” Saying in essence, my life will be complete after whatever great thing we experience that day – seeing a concert, eating dangerous sushi, meeting Tommy Wiseau, etc. But it did raise the interesting idea of where my dusty old bones should repose for all eternity. I immediately thought Chicago, because honestly, as much as I like Scranton, there ain’t a whole hell of a lot to do there when you’re alive. The afterlife in NEPA must be boring as shit.
She then mentioned getting cremated, which didn’t sound all that appealing either. If there is some manner of lurking around purgatory/Hell on earth haunting loved ones and strangers alike, I don’t want to waste that potentially fun/horrifying experience as a pile of soot flung into the Susquehanna or residing in a rusty Dutch Boy can.
Kickin' back in my freezer time capsule with a cold one and my memories
So that’s when I hit on my master plan. I’ve gotta save up a couple bucks and get this old carcass frozen, so that down the road I can be thawed out and resuscitated, or cloned, or just kept around intact for when the aliens come with their superior technology and Lazarus like curing capabilities (a realistic goal, I’d say).
I mean, how much could that possibly cost? Keeping your old, broken down sack of cartilage and gonads refrigerated for an unknown series of decades? A goddamn bundle, right? And at what age does one decide to make that happen? Do you really want to be cured of all ailments, but forced to spend the undoubtedly mindblowingly awesome 25th century as an 80-year-old bundle of joint pain? I should probably hop in the reefer sooner than later, while I still have some mobility and most of my hair, right?
Rumor is that I taste a lot like boiled rabbit, and am high in zinc
But what if this goofy Rip Van Winkle/Demolition Man plan doesn’t work? Where does that leave me? I’m stuck in some cryo lab accumulating freezer burn like discount ground beef only for some future crackpot in the ozone layer free/post nuclear holocaust world to slap me on the grill and serve Cetta-ka-bobs to the half mutant/half zombie survivors? I don’t like the sound of that one bit! I’d like to keep my delicious rib meat secured to the old corpus, after all the time we’ve spent together.
The risk still might be worth it though. Sure, the world has advanced pretty rapidly just in the years when I’ve been roaming around looking for beer specials and cheap, signed novels by the poorer selling authors of our time. Hell, when I was born there were no reality shows, no IMAX theaters, and no cars that ran on corn! These were the dark ages, people!
But just let your mind wander to the world of even 50 years from now. You just pictured all sorts of flying chrome nonsense and people wearing silvery outfits and the planet you’re inhabiting having multiple suns and your own personal chocolate fondue fountain in the backyard, right? And that’s this century! I want to see the crazy shit of hundreds of years from now! I want the insane Time Machine world, where I’m being prepared as food for the monsters underground! Dammit, in most scenarios I can imagine I end up the main course. I wonder what that’s about.
And so, the basic framework of a plan placing me at the opening ceremonies of the 2464 Summer Olypics (finally being held at the Sea of Tranquility) is in place! Step one can now commence! Sure, you’ll all be dead and gone, but I will think fondly of you from time to time, I promise. Maybe they will have museums and theme park rides dedicated to the early 21st century, with logs of Facebook statuses, and I’ll see your daily griping about the price of gas and the silly things your pets do. How fun! So until the distant future – so long, suckers!
(Step one involves accumulating an obscene amount of money, so anyone looking to finance this expedition through time is welcome to submit cash, money orders, gold bars, jewels, and vats of petroleum to our offices here in Chicago. No personal checks please.)
Knowingly Undersold 