Loot

The slow decay of my physical form cannot be arrested by Earth technology.

Birthday Cake by Anthony Eden.

Usually this is an excellent opportunity to get some loot into my life; every birthday, I come up with a list of stuff to pad out my meagre earthly existence.  This year’s been funny though: with my recent bout of introspection and continuing evolution into intrisic vs. extrinsic rewards, I find that there’s little stuff I want.  Let’s not even get started on need.

Don’t you worry.  I’ve risen to the challenge and come up with a few choice items, but what I’ve found is that the things I’m trending towards wanting are … less stuff.  The list of loot demands are trending towards things that provide experiences and nothing that looks like a consumer electronic or toy or widget.

It reminds me a little of my 40th birthday (still recent enough to be within living memory), where I asked people to give things to other people instead of me.  You know, donate a goat to a family in the Sudan or whatever.  That fell a little flat on the delivery side of things — most people turned up for the open bar, got drunk, and completely forgot there was a birthday in there somewhere.  Whatever, I enjoyed the idea that people could benefit from the advancement of my mortal coil towards its extinction.

I feel like I don’t know myself anymore.