a wasted life

by nick nelson

joe bixby, tom brown, sid johnson, and bill brady hung out on the corner together for many years. one day tom brown died. the other three got together on the corner later that night. poor tom, joe said. he wasted his life, and never amounted to anything. what do you mean?, sid replied indignantly. how did he waste his life? he never amounted to anything, joe repeated. he never even got his name in the paper. it will be in the paper tomorrow, bill said. in the death notices. his wife told me so. that doesn’t count, sid said. everybody gets their name in the paper once, when they die. he was never famous like michael jordan or hitler or taylor swift or some real famous person. what is a real famous person? bill asked. a real person who is famous, or a person who is really famous? bill was always asking dumb questions like that because he thought he knew everything, but joe and sid ignored him. i bet , sid continued, tom never said one original thing in his whole life, or thought one either. not that it made him a bad person. look here, bill said, according to wikipedia 117,000,000,000 humans have lived on earth since the beginning of time. assume an average life span of each person of 33 years, or about 12,000 days. suppose each of the 117 billion produced at least one original or witty thought - just one - every day. this would result in a total of 1,404,000,000,000,000 witty and original thoughts. suppose a book was to be produced recording these thoughts. let us assume 3 or 4 of the thoughts would fit on one page. the book would be about 400,000,000,000,000 (400 trillion) pages long. it would take one person reading 400 pages a day a trillion days, or about 2.7 billion years, to read the book. that is really interesting, bill, sid said. joe nodded. he had not listened to a word bill said. a police car swung by, catching joe, sid, and bill in its headlights, and moved on without stopping.