Tuesday, July 15, 2008

The Day of Reckoning


It's official. Deathclock.com - a website that I had heard of a long time ago and found time to browse only yesterday has chosen the day for me. It offered a variety of combinations to evaluate a day of demise and the two combinations that I tried with an honest heart conjured up the same date. Scary, huh? And then I tried various other false combinations of smoker/non-smoker ('coz I am somewhere in between) and sadist/optimist (somewhere in between again), just to check and the dates were came up different. But the original date was what stuck in my mind.

July 8th, 2021.
My last day on earth, and then maybe onto a happier, prettier place. That leaves me about 13 years to do what I came to do, or at least to figure out that I was intended to serve no purpose at all. So many things to do, places to visit, people to meet and so little time. My impending demise leaves me with at least one less worry. That worry is the need to worry or be sad because frankly speaking I haven't got time enough. If that fateful Thursday (Yes, Deathclock.com told me that too) is really to be my last and I were to pick a really self-centred list (as a condemned man ought to have the freedom to) of 13 aims to be accomplished off the top of my head, they would be the following:

(In no particular order)
1. Drive a Porsche 911 down a sun-baked Mediterranean coast.
2. Go on a majestic cruise across the width of the Atlantic from England to America.
3. To visit the remote islands of Easter in the lap of the majestic blue Pacific.
4. Hike up the Andes to the haunting ruins of Machu Pichu in Peru.
5. Spend a day on the cool marble of the Taj Mahal, on a baking Agra summer day (That's the only thing on this list that I've accomplished yet but I don't mind doing it all over again)
6. Do an African safari in a Land Rover, where else but in the Serengeti!
7. Get astride a KTM Super Duke and let it rip through desolate night-time city streets.
8. Visit one of those mysterious paper palaces up in the mist covered mountains that frequently make an appearance in Japanese paintings.
9. Live for a month in an old seaside mansion complete with its own grounds bordering the sea, its own guard dogs and a family ghost too.
10. Work a job that pays me for being lazy, i.e the lazier I am, the higher I am paid. Something like a model for the comforts of Kurl-On Pillow.
11. Sit on a desert dune and just gaze at the Pyramids from a distance.
12. Sky-dive from the highest altitudes humanly possible to feel the incomparable thrill that must come with free-falling and gliding through the air.
13. Put all of the above and every incident that occurred in between into a book that everybody'd would love to read (Now that's wishful thinkng, if there was ever any)!

Life isn't such a pain if you find that you don't have to deal with it for too long. For such a wonderful sense of transience, I owe a very grim website my heart-felt gratitude.