What bothers me about death is really quite simple. After a lifetime (seventy-one years and counting) of thinking, debating with friends, campaigning, running for local office, serving in office, consoling and reassuring friends when they are close to giving up hope for this primate project that we call humanity ... after all of that, I want to know if we survive another 250 years as a nation, and looking back from the standpoint of say, 500 years in the future, did anything that good people worked so hard to accomplish really make a difference?

Call it idle curiosity if you will, but I think we all deserve to know the outcome of our striving. So God (my name for that creative agency which is ultimately responsible for setting our evolving and expanding universe in motion), if you can hear my thoughts, or feel my affective impulses, I would appreciate being reconstituted in about 250 years, and again in 500 years, and given a complete update on the world and how humanity is managing it.

I know that is quite an ask, and I am thankful that you apparently haven't taken offense at the implication of my questions (namely, that you summoned this vast, incredibly beautiful planet into being, and then picked the very worst possible species to be in charge of it ... thus assuring that the whole damned mess will likely self-destruct)!

Anyway, that is my request. And please don't get annoyed, but just one more thing--so easy for you that I am almost embarrassed to bring it up: if there is still a Korea in 250 years--or maybe still two Koreas--

and if the Koreans are still making that wonderful beverage known as Chum Churun soju, would you be a dear and please have a nice, chilled gimlet waiting for me when I finish the reconstitution process?

Oh what the hell ... I already know what I am likely to learn in that initial update--so if you don't mind, could you make it a double?