I lived most of my adult life in Larchmont, a small waterfront community about 20 miles from New York City. The town is nestled against Long Island Sound and most of the land is at sea level. My house was on a small hill, about 30 feet above sea level. Whenever it rained and the tide was high, the small turnabout at the end of the street would flood to a depth of four or five feet. It would take days for the sewage-infested salt water to recede. Some of the residents at the end of the block owned rowboats…

“I dreamed I was a butterfly looking down on me sleeping. When I awoke, I did not know whether I was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or whether I was now a butterfly now dreaming he was a man.” The Taoist sage Zhuangzi, circa 400BC

Last evening, I leaned out my 17th floor balcony to take a photo of Manhattan in the clear evening air. To my right, I could see the New York Skyline. The Empire State building was illuminated by red, white and blue lights. The Freedom Tower at the tip of Manhattan shimmered…

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”

March 5th 2030

The elevator doors opened, and I stepped out and rushed to our mail room. “Here, Mike,” our mail carrier said as he handed me a manila envelope with a government seal on the upper left corner. I thanked him and walked back to the elevator. On the ride up to my apartment, I remembered that the following day was my 90th birthday.

I opened the envelope and as I had hoped, it was the application that I had been expecting. It was from the U.S. Department of Life Extension…

It was a late afternoon in September. I was having a drink in a downtown Vancouver bar near the wharf with my friend Frank, a brown 400-pound Giant Pacific Octopus from the Gulf Islands, off the town of Victoria. We had been getting together for a drink every month for the past year.

I set up my computer and started Google Translate for our conversation. (Did you know that Google offered interspecies translating for $14.50 a month?) …

In 2017, a family member named Adelle told me about a personal experience that I was going to hear many times over the next few years.

The previous year she had fallen while painting a mural high up on a pool house wall. She landed head-first on the concrete slab surrounding the pool. Her head was bleeding, and she was unconscious. Her husband called 911 and the paramedic who checked her pulse said that her heart had stopped beating.

“Mike,” she said, “I was floating inside a tunnel whose walls were made of clouds. It was so peaceful. I sensed…

I Love Superhumans

As children, we are drawn to fairy tales about giants, wizards and monsters. As we grow older, many of us remain fascinated by stories of superheroes. Stan Lee, the creator of numerous fictional superheroes, such as Spiderman, for comic books and movies, produced a successful tv series called “Superhumans.” Its 31 episodes portrayed people with unusual endurance, strength, memory, flexibility, temperature control, resistance to heat and cold and other qualities one might label “superpowers.” Lee gave his episodes exotic titles: “Electroman,” “Killer Punch,” “Rubber Band Man,” and “Human Crash Test Dummy.”

I loved this series and watched…

Many years before the invention of cell phones and the global positioning system, my wife and I took a road trip through rural Vermont. At some point we got lost, and our maps turned out to be useless. We drove up the gravel driveway to a nearby farmhouse and heard the sound of someone splitting logs for firewood.

We introduced ourselves to the farmer, an old and bearded man, and asked for directions. My wife noticed the axe he was using and asked him about its history. He said, “Well, this axe is been in my family since 1860.” We…

It’s early morning on New Year’s Day 2075. I’m sitting in my living room with a cup of coffee and watching the snow fall. The fireplace is throwing off heat as the logs slowly vanish. I’m enjoying a conversation with my twin “brother” who inhabits a small but powerful laptop computer that sits on a table with a view of our garden. Mike2, as we agreed to call him, doesn’t drink coffee or anything else. He is my uploaded brain.

I’m 81 years old and today is Mike2’s “birthday.” Three years ago, two technicians from Eternal Life Brain Scans came…