Navel Gazing

Someone wrote in her blog about pissing away our allotted time, as if it were something borrowed like a mortgage. She went on to postulate that from where she sat, at the age of 62, her rent will soon be coming due. 

          The idea of borrowed time caused me a moment of contemplation, which is a lifetime for me, since nano seconds are usually the extent of my short attention span. Just exactly who has lent me this time? Does he look like Morgan Freeman? And to whom will I be making my payment? One of those people in a toll booth?

          Then, like dominoes falling, my thoughts continued to cascade, causing me to wonder, when someone dies young, does their allotted time get banked for someone else, since they only used part of it?  Perhaps we are all on a list, based on how much time we have left in our lives. When our time's up, do we go to the top of the list and hope someone dies really young so we can have their remaining time and have a chance to become the oldest person in the world? Or do we have to earn the spare time somehow with multiple good deeds or years of honest effort? And could we pass on the offer and just die when it's our time? 

          On the other hand, those leftover years might be divided equally among family members without anybody realizing it, except when they all get into their nineties. I can also see unused minutes going into a huge pot to be divvied up once a year in some kind of a worldwide lottery. They could call it the Time's Up lottery. And it would work something like the Mega Millions or the Power Ball. But I don't know where you'd get a ticket or who'd run the thing. I do know that your money would be no good. Tickets would only be purchased by investing some of your time. Perhaps that happens anyway. 

          The movie, which will no doubt be made, would star Tom Hanks as the accountant in charge of the leftover lifetimes. Who else? He keeps track of how much extra time there is at any given time. 

          He would report to a board of directors led by Tom Selleck, Tom Cruise, Tommy Lee Jones, and Tom Sizemore, because I just thought that guys named Tom would make it easy for people to remember who was in the movie. They meet once year in Las Vegas to decide who gets more time to live. Their decisions would be based first on the luck of the draw. Since they're in Las Vegas, each member of the board picks a card. The Tom with the highest card wins the right to decide how many people get some leftover time. He also gets to decide what his decision will be based on. Say Tommy Lee Jones picks the winning card this year. He could decide that 100,000 lucky people can divide up all the leftover time among themselves for that year. But those 100,000 people can only have years of extra time added to their lives if they wear a Size 11 shoe. Or XL latex gloves. Or they use a c-pap machine. Think of the requirements. It's a bureaucrat's dream. 

          Speaking of dreams, it's about time I woke up out of this one. The ninth season of MI5 is waiting for me.