Attention!

Anyone within sight of this who may know me:

If something unfortunate should ever happen to me (bus accident, massive stroke, drug overdose, well-timed meteor) and I end up within ten miles of a persistent vegetative state, I order you to pull each and every plug as fast as you can. And I mean, I want you all lined up in the waiting room, wire cutters in one hand, cooler for the viable organs in the other. Everything Must Go. I mean it.

I say this not because I am a morbid man, and not because I have any kind of death wish. I say this because apparently, unless I take out an ad in the f***ing newspaper about it, somebody important might actually think I would prefer spending 20 years wired up like the Lawnmower Man in a diaper full of my own waste, that this is what I would prefer to going to heaven.

Every so often, a controversy is stirred over some poor creature with a tube down his/her throat and a pan under his/her bum who “did not make his/her wishes clear” before wrestling with that alligator. And the thing about it that I always find interesting is that I have had that conversation 100 times in my life with 100 different people, and every one of them has begun with the other person saying, “If anything would ever happen to me, I wouldn’t want to be kept alive in some damn coma” while shaking his head violently. I have never in my entire life encountered anyone who has ever said, “Hoo, Lordy, hook me up! Stay the hand of the reaper-man at all costs, for the love of Lindy! Maybe fifteen years into my vegetation, seven years after my nose started itching, they’ll discover the cure for a missing brain and be able to teach me to blink and swallow again! And the coma will have left me rested and ready for my fifties!” Who has said this to you? Who has said this to anyone? If you’re out there, say so; I would like to meet and possibly shake you.