I’ll read about the life of a great author and the narration will go something like “after being afflicted with smallpox and syphilis after his mother got hit by a runaway chariot, John Writerovitch spent 2 years gambling at the local casino where he would later write his first copy of Awesome Book on both sides of the toilet paper in debtor’s prison before finally succumbing to metastasized hemorrhoids.” I’ll read that they were 47 when they started writing. That they’d spent all their time being a lawyer and wrote only in their off-hours. That they’d burnt the only manuscript of their magnum opus while in inconsolable anguish. And it pisses me off.

Well, what if you’d started writing one year earlier? What if you hadn’t burnt your only copy? How difficult can it be to write a few measly pages a day while under a heavy fever! What if you’d written even through your anguish? Clinged on to your words as your lifeline? At least we’d have a few more pages from you! At least you wouldn’t be incomplete!

When you write so well you become a public good, it becomes difficult not me not to entertain these unfair thoughts. And so I think about future historians, who will make museums about us 8.1 billion ancient folk from Ye Old Earth, and how frustrated they will be that tonight, I am vomiting my guts out onto the sidewalk from nightclub overdose. They’ll be severely annoyed when I get crushed by a garbage truck after forgetting to look both left and right on the road. They’ll pull their hair out

  1. In the future, when everyone has a crew of friendly nanobots buzzing through their body, regrowing hair instantly won’t be a problem. ↩