I wouldn't even have to be just one person. I could live one life as one person and another life as someone else all in twenty minutes. I could live in whatever time or place or even planet I wanted to.

 

I could control gravity and physics so that real life was like a roadrunner cartoon. I could be the roadrunner, or even just make up my own cartoon character (like I just did). You know how the laws of physics are immutable and constant and can be studied and learned the same way all the time? How you can't create or destroy matter or energy, angle of incidence equals angle of reflection, an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force, and blah blah blah? Forget all that. In my universe, the laws of physics are what I say they are. So from now on, angle of incidence equals Dominos cheesy bread. Forget relativity, too. From now on, everything is relative to how I feel about it.

 

I could change history just to see what would happen. You know, like what if Thomas Jefferson freed the slaves and there was no Civil War, or what if the Bolshevik Revolution had failed. That would be cool. Except that once I read this story where this old hippy woman was protesting nuclear something and she went back in time to try to fix it so that there was no atomic bomb, and then every time she did something worse happened, like once she just delayed it so that the Germans and the Russians both got the bomb too, and once there was no bomb but the U.S. had to invade Japan and the war went on for like 10 more years and millions more people died. But on second thought, this is my universe and I make the rules and everyone has to do what I say. And if things get too screwed up I can always change them back.

 

Now. you might also wonder about death. Am I just going to wipe out death altogether? I've thought about it. On the one hand you have kids with cancer and all that stuff that just seems monumentally unfair. Whole populations devastated by disease and pestilence. Plus, on TV, you have people like that Whoopi Goldberg character on Star Trek, and Angel from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and they just make immortality seem so cool. And for some reason I want to mention Soylent Green and Logan's Run but I can't remember how they fit into it.

 

But here's what I think. You know how some people reach a certain age and they get all depressed  because their lives haven't turned out like they wanted them to, and they haven't accomplished all that they wanted to? I'm not just talking about a 40-year-old guy waiting tables in L.A.  and still going to audition for bit parts on Relic Hunter, or the 50 year old businessman stuck in a cubicle on the 3rd floor....everyone goes through this at some point, and lots of folks never get over it. Or through it. Or whatever. Plus, you know how old people sometimes sit around all depressed or get all bitter and angry and sit on the porch screaming for the kids to get off their lawn? Well, imagine if people lived forever, how angry and bitter and depressed everyone would be. Imagine how they are now and multiply it by a million. So, yeah, I would pretty much leave death alone, except for those kids with cancer and whatnot.

 

Anyway, that's how it would be in my universe.

 

 

Yesterday I was reminded, and quite rudely, by someone who knew me back then that I didn't win that joke-writing contest, and it was in the 10th grade not the 8th. Even though I usually don't remember things that way; in fact I tend to magnify my failures, if anything. It keeps me humble. Also, I was told by two different guys that this is an old joke that they heard before, even though one of those guys has known me exactly that long and he first heard it from me. And, given the limitations of the English language, and the fact that it's a fairly obvious joke, it's likely that at least 100 different moderately creative people could have independently thought this up. I mean, how many different guys independently invented the radio? Does it take away from their acheivement that someone else did the same thing? Actually, it probably does. But I still think it's a funny joke. And anyway, even if 100 other people did think it up, I bet none of them drew the picture like I did.