Are you ready for the Afterlife? Yeah, me either. This life is far too much fun to contemplate anything else. Someone mentions “afterlife” to me, first I confuse it with “afterbirth”, then everything I learned about heaven in Sunday school clicks in — you know, harps and grapes and lions frolicking with lambs, printed in those post-war pastel colors that religious tracts used to come in. Don’t get me wrong, I like harps, Celtic harps particularly, but we’re talking harps 24/7 for, like, ever, right? So I’ll pass on the Hereafter, given a choice.

But of course, that’s the whole point, I’m not given a choice. Whether my destination is already destined, as it were, or my life-after-death outcome is determined by some arcane point system (+2 for washing up without being asked, -5 for shoplifting Playboy when I was 18), I don’t get to choose. Thumbs up, thumbs down, where I end up is all in the hands of the god(s).

When I say “I,” I don’t, of course, mean the entirety of “me.” You can’t just ship a whole body off to the next world without violating the law of Conservation of Mass. (Similarly, you can’t travel back through time, inserting your body into a previous era, without breaking that most fundamental law of physics.) (Excepting the Second Law of Thermodynamics.)

Sorry, got tangentalized there. I was getting round to saying, it’s not “me” that’s heading off after death, it’s my soul. Massless. Carrying information about me, but not actually me. (Shit, there goes the 2nd Law.) I just received a chirpy neologism list yesterday (thank youknowwho) including this definition of “Frisbeetarianism”: The belief that when you die, your soul flies up on the roof and gets stuck there. (Hence this column.)

Anyway, there’s my soul, winging around in the Hereafter, having a gay old time, carefully avoiding those other souls whom I knew back on Earth and are best avoided in the next life as in this one. Might be fun. But again, we’re talking about Eternity, are we not? And isn’t what makes this life so worthwhile the fact that it comes in a limited edition? Too much of a good thing and there goes all the joy and wonder.

[Tangentalizing again, in our culture (with its roots in ancient Sumeria, Egypt, Israel and Greece), god(s) and afterlives go hand in hand, you don’t get one without the other. But a few hundred million Buddhists would disagree—there’s afterlife all right (in several varieties depending on the sect), but no gods to mediate it all; the system runs on automatic. You can have an afterlife without gods, and for that matter, gods without afterlives.]

Need I state the obvious without invoking reincarnation, purgatory, limbo, bardo, valhalla, gehenna and all the rest? No one gets out of here alive, and anyone who claims to know anything about the afterlife hasn’t actually died. You die, you die. (You get hypoxia, drop acid, have brain lesions — you have hallucinations.) Hoping for a better afterlife makes us less inclined to make the most of this one, whether it’s a vale of tears or a ladder of angels. (Usually both.)

I don’t think I got Ecclesiastes at Sunday school, which is a shame, it’s the best part of the Bible. Especially this:

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die…for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.”

Carpe diem!