Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

I won’t go into detail about our exercise session, but suffice it to say, we fell pretty far short of the hour mark. So depending on how much you believe Fitbit’s stats—which, frankly, seem a tad low to me—we didn’t break 88 calories.

Even sadder: The following month—despite the big plans and the dopamine and the scent of Good & Plenty—Julie and I fell back into our old subaverage schedule. We’re just not motivated enough. I pledge to seek professional help. Before the end of the project, I plan to see a urologist.

Checkup: Month 7

     Weight: 158

     Blood pressure: 110/70

     Cans of steel-cut oatmeal consumed this year: 11

     Average hours per day wearing noise-canceling earphones: 10

     Pounds lifted on squat machine (15 reps): 150

To paraphrase James Brown, I feel moderately good. Every day, I look at the digitally aged photo of myself and try to honor Old A.J. I’m eating a little better. The cravings for sugar and salt still wash over me, but they’re weakening. (And because I’ve weaned myself from salt, my palate has changed. It’s more sensitive. When I break down and have a potato chip, the saltiness is overwhelming, as if I’m emptying a shaker on my tongue.)

At the gym, Tony tries to work me hard enough to make my glasses steam up. “That was a lens fogger,” he’ll say proudly, after a set of fifty squats.

I’m trying, with moderate success, to control my stress. So I’m self-massaging every day. That is not a euphemism. Studies show that rubbing your own shoulders decreases levels of the stress hormone cortisol. So I rub myself while riding the bus or reading the paper.

My family, though, is becoming impatient with the project. My sons are annoyed that I won’t eat cupcakes with them at birthday parties, opting instead for a plastic bag of carrots. They keep asking me why it’s so important to me that I be healthy.

“It’s so I don’t get sick,” I tell them one day as I spoon my steel-cut oatmeal. “So I can stay around and be with you for a long, long time.”

“So you don’t die?” says Lucas.

“Right. So I don’t die.”

I had been avoiding the D-word. But the kids cut right to it. My boys are well aware of death. My twins finish every story they make up with the same phrase: “Then everyone died. The end.”

It works no matter the subject. “And the octopus went to the circus. He saw the lions and tigers and had some cotton candy. Then everyone died. The end.” Or else, “Curious George climbed up the tree to get his kite. He got his kite. Then everyone died. The end.”

I don’t think they are being macabre. They are just looking for a tidy way to wrap up a complicated plot. It’s effective, if a tad deus ex machina.

At the same time, they are starting to get concerned about this notion of death.

A few days ago, Lucas told me, “When I grow up, I want to be a character in a book so that I never die.” That broke my heart, and made me want to warn him to avoid his own stories.

Around the same time, Zane begged me to put him on my shoulders so he could touch the ceiling in every room of our apartment. I told him I couldn’t do it right then, but I would later that evening when I got home. “But what if you die before you get home?” he asked. I put him on my shoulders. He’s a smart negotiator, and I’m a sucker.

Today, over our Sunday Chinese dinner (which I don’t eat, of course), Zane asked me the dreaded question about what happens to people after they die.

What do I say? I don’t want to patronize them and say we’ll all go to heaven, since I remain agnostic about an afterlife. But I don’t want to stress the possibility of a Yawning Void of Nothingness. That could devastate them. A friend of ours has a six-year-old son suffering through a premidlife crisis about his impending lack of existence, saying things like “I know God doesn’t exist because He doesn’t talk to me. So when I die, I’ll be nothing. And I don’t want to be nothing.” Long crying jags follow.

I decided that admitting my ignorance was the best way to go.

“No one’s sure what happens. Some people think it’s like you go to sleep for a long time, but you don’t dream.”

They seem to be processing that one.

“And some people think we go somewhere called ‘heaven,’ which is a wonderful place.”

“I hope that one is true,” says Julie.

“And some people think we won’t ever die.”

Julie shoots me a look.

“There’s a man named Aubrey de Grey, and he’s got a looong beard.” I draw my hand from my chin down to my stomach. “And he’s a scientist. And he says that soon we will be able to keep our cells from getting old. Cells are tiny pieces of us and they sometimes make garbage, and we just have to clean up the garbage. And maybe that would make us live forever.”

“Like infinity years?” asks Jasper.

“Right,” I say. “And there’s another scientist named Ray Kurzweil who thinks we may be able to upload our brains into a computer and live forever that way.”

“But we don’t have to worry about any of this for a long time,” says Julie.

Julie thinks I’m doing crazy talk. She tells me so later: “You’re giving them false hope. You’re feeding their delusions of immortality.” Maybe she’s right. But I’ve been steeping myself in books about the life extension movement. I’ve been reading about telomeres and sirtuins. I’ve read how some scientists think the humble lobster may hold some clues to immortality, since aging doesn’t inflict damage on lobster cells. If not for outside forces like disease and predators, the average lobster might just keep on crawling along the bottom of the ocean for centuries.

The science of indefinite life extension isn’t totally fringe anymore. It’s not like Yeti or cold fusion.