I don’t want to see anyone I love die or get sick. It’s a simple desire, and yet it is one of my only constant desires in life. Call me fucked up, tell me I need therapy, but I would love to see the world just cease to exist in 2030. My grandmother died a few months ago, and I’m still be affected by that. I don’t think there will be a time that the pain won’t be in my heart. I love my mom, dad, sister, and a few other special people, and every time anything happens to them, I’m always overly concerned. My mom was in the hospital – I’m already preparing for the worst – my dad got into a car wreck – I immediately give him twenty questions as soon as I hear about it. My family is essential to my life – they are what has by and large shaped me these twenty years, and have given me so many of my abilities. I have accrued a debt that I will probably never be able to pay off in full.

And writing this, I would personally love to see the ultimate communism, everyone, regardless of age, sex, gender, nationality, ethnicity disappear from this earth at the same time. I know that there are over 6 billion people, each individual having their own ties to family, whether they be daughter, son, parent, grandparent, uncle, and each time a soul passes from this earth an ethereal knife is jabbed permanently in their heart. If everyone just had that equal opportunity to fall at the same time, there would be none of these people dying of a broken heart. This passing-on can’t be gradual, can’t be the traumatic deaths of a nuclear winter or an artificial ice age created by a comet – this has to be a simultaneous death of humanity.

While there are considerable advancements being made in extending the life expectancy for everyone, two key issues still exist in this discussion. First off, some individuals who are in poorer parts of countries are still dying before they even reach middle age, with AIDS only further decreasing the life expectancy worldwide, and secondly, people still die. Kurt Vonnegut might have written about a tremendous overcrowding in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” brought on by near-immortality, but there are still limitless possibilities for housing in the world, whether it be in terraforming the deserts or building vertically massive living units like the planned X-Seed 4000 or Millennium Tower (both in Tokyo, Japan). The incredible achievements done in technology in the last 100 years or so have surpassed any innovations in the five millennia before them, so what is to say that limited immortality might become feasible in the next fifty years?

I’d like to make the case that I am in someway not the most selfish person that has ever tramped on this Earth, but I’m up there. I don’t want to lose the only people that truly, utterly, actually mean a shit to me. I think I’m the ultimate humanist as well – I don’t want to see anyone die, even if they may be the most noxious, evil motherfucker that has ever existed. Case in point: one of the people that I actually fought with in High School (the only time I actually got into a fight), joined the Marines and promptly picked up a case of Malaria from where ey was stationed. I finally round out that ey was okay as of the time when I started writing this piece, and while ey was a true-blue asshole, ey still is a human, and deserves my respect as a result of it.

I see where this argument is going to be going, and for those who say “Why don’t you accord the same status of respect to animals?” I would counter that I do offer this same respect – I have tried to incorporate more and more in the way of vegetarian and vegan foods into my diet. However, I don’t foresee me forsaking meat products at any time due to my beliefs as a freegan – if someone offers me meat and the only other option besides me eating it would be the trash, or if I recover some meat products while dumpster-diving, I’m not going to be wasteful. Right now, since I am in such a slim monetary budget, it just is not feasible to go any more vegetarian or vegan than I am not – to do so would drain my finances. However, while I do currently eat meat, I would like not to be logically inconsistent – I don’t see the reasoning behind the stigma against eating certain animals due to “cuteness” or “approachability”. If provided with the option, (if I haven’t already, under dark circumstances like food mislabeling) I would eat dog or cat. After the animal passes on or if situations are extremely dire, I don’t see how I can be morally superior to a family who only has the means to eat something that more comfortable individuals would have as a pet.

It pains me when I see anything die, it pains me twice as much when something dies and I never had the chance to know it. Every second that passes, four individuals perish that I have probably haven’t seen in my life. Whenever I pass houses, it pains my heart that each single individual house has a rich history and number of individuals in it that I will never know. What dragged me into the mess of fratlandia in 2003 was partially this feeling – I had done some research into failed fraternities and sororities at DePauw University, and after Alyson and I split, this feeling of wanting to experience everything (to understand this, I used to call myself jokingly a “trysexual” – I would try anything once) as well as the gaping wound in my heart that us breaking up threw me headlong into the frat. Do you know what, I still don’t regret joining a frat, or living there the first semester of my Junior year? I gained some valuable experiences, got to know so many individuals I wouldn’t have met otherwise, and I learned a chunk of rich history that not many people know.

My head continually plays a movie of my past; I live in the past, present, and future. Even though my future is as bright as a supernova, as I stand at the edge of undergraduate studies at DePauw University, the fact that sometime, far in the future, I will lose some of the people I love the most causes me to scurry back to my house, to the safe events of the past. The local school newspaper asked 5 students if they would move back with their parents after graduation; 4 vehemently said no, some called moving back “a step back”. These people don’t realize how shitty life will be after they burn up through the ranks of whatever company they join, and lose someone that they haven’t even had time to see in years. I may be half the way around the world in 5, 10, 20 years but my heart is firmly in the McQuiston home.