Today I am thirty.

For a big chunk of my life I was defined by how young I was when I did things. Now the contexts in which I'd be considered young are pretty much limited to running for president or being appointed to the College of Cardinals. My youth is gone, and it feels like a small death.

I have always been obsessed with death. Not in a goth way, but in a semi-autistic, calculating way. I am constantly aware of how little time I have left. When I was ten, I would think over my life to date and think, "Given my life expectancy, I get seven more of these." When I was fifteen, I would think, "I get four or five more of these." Now I'm thirty, and even if I catch a lot of breaks, I still get only two more of these, and the second one is likely to suck. And I don't get any more youths.

It is as if I have a little "Time Elapsed:" bar in the corner of my consciousness, like the one at the bottom of the window when I watch movies on my computer. Windows Me Player. I'm aware of every frame encoded in the file and can never think solely of the one that's actually on the screen. And because I'm always thinking about every frame, it doesn't feel like there's any time between them, only space, as with the panels of a comic book. There is a point in the past at which I'm sixteen, working after school on the school newspaper with a girl I had a crush on. At this point in the past, I am thinking, "Right this moment I can see her. There is a point in the future at which I will not be able to see her. When I reach this point it will not feel like any time has passed since the point at which I thought about this." Then I drove her home and she went into her house and I couldn't see her and it didn't feel like any time had passed since I'd been thinking about the fact that soon I wouldn't be able to see her. And thinking about this, I don't feel any gulf of time between that day and this.

I cannot play with the cats without thinking, "There is a point in the past at which Jen and I are bringing the kittens home for the first time. It does not feel like any time has passed between that point and this. There is a point in the future at which they are old and decrepit and not interested in pursuing cat toys anymore. There is another point in the future at which they are dead and I am thinking, 'Remember how Ditko used to chase the mousies?' And then I will think about having imagined this future point. Which is no longer the future." It adds complexity to the experience of playing with the cats.

There is a point in the future at which I die. I guess it was when I was about nine years old that I felt the full horror of the realization that it is going to happen, that just as real as the time at which I am lying in my bed in Anaheim staring at the popcorn ceiling is the time at which I have no more experience of anything than I had in 1972, or 1971, or 1871, or 1871 million years ago, that that time without me isn't a contingency, that it is happening at a point in the future. Realizing this, really coming to grips with it, felt like being stabbed in the heart while drowning.

Later, when I was a teenager, I thought about the fact that I will die, and thought, "But what does the I mean? It's not my body — that changes. It's not my personality — that changes. It's not anything except the feeling that 'That's me!' The feeling of 'That's me!' going on in someone else's head is no less foreign to me than the feeling of 'That's me!' that I had when I was younger or the feeling of 'That's me!' that I will have in the future. Thus, as long as there is intelligent life, as long as there is a feeling of 'That's me!' somewhere in the universe, 'I' will not be dead."

Thinking this way, all I had to worry about was stuff like proton decay, but at least that wasn't quite so immediate. I could think, "Okay, so I get about 10⁹⁹ more of these."

But practically speaking, it is my death as a conventionally-defined individual rather than as a locus of sentience that has dictated a lot of the way I think about things. I can't do much of anything without thinking about whether I will on my deathbed regret the time I'm spending. Making things counts as a good use of time. Even little essays like this. I suppose part of the reason I write articles about the media I consume is to somehow validate the time spent on that media by turning it into a prompt to make something. Intimacy counts. When Jen and I lose an entire evening on different floors of the house doing nothing constructive but instead playing computer games or poking at web sites, I am troubled — not just because I would prefer that we were snuggling, but because when I am about to die I am going to think, "You had a limited amount of time to spend with her, and now it's over, and you spent hours of it on different floors of the house playing computer games and poking at web sites."

Or maybe tomorrow I will accidentally walk in front of a bus and not have time to think anything but "Eeeagh!"

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