Recently my favorite game show host and game show player to watch and creator of dad jokes, Ken Jennings, came out with a book called "100 Places to See After You Die," a funny title about a very serious topic: where do we go after we die? As someone who's spent quite a few wakeless nights pondering death and being deathly scared of it, maybe the afterlife isn't as bad as I fear? So many different cultures have so many different views on the afterlife, and most suggest it's some kind of other dimension that's completely separate from our current world, but I've recently wondered due to my reading about multiverses, what if the afterlife is just this world that we live in now repeated, except we go down a different path of life, instead of a lawyer I became a teacher? Or instead of moving to the U.S. at age 5 I stayed in China my whole life? Maybe these different versions of my life just keep playing out over and over again, without me knowing it. Maybe I'm in a version of the afterlife now, what's to say? The common thread for all of these afterlife Ken and others theorize about is, no one knows for sure. It's kind of fun to think about; Ken suggests it's maybe just a big neverending baseball game, where you're just in the seats watching games over and over again. This is likely too intellectually passive for someone like Ken, or even for me: I would prefer afterlife to maybe be in a bookstore or library reading all the books I never got to in my real life, just one after the other without ever getting bored. For those who think this may be a version of hell instead of heaven in being stuck reading all the time, I kind of get it, but maybe in the afterlife we don't have a concept of getting bored, there's consistent rushes of adrenaline and concentration that flow through us to keep us engaged and reading. So many books, like this weekend I just started A People's History of the United States, "The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, and MJ and I both read "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," the Amazon 2022 Book of the Year, a favorite of video game players. Or it's a neverending chess game that I play continuously; for MJ maybe it would be a continous display of pictures of people with larger engagement rings than hers, or hugging cute cats, or arranging flowers and pictures on a wall in an aesthetically pleasing way. All good candidates.
Speaking of chess, I'd stopped going to chess for a few reasons: 1.) summer is more for being outside and not indoor games, 2.) I was donating platelets on Sundays, and 3.) I kept getting my clock cleaned at the games and would start games against opponents I thought I had a chance against but then get humbled thoroughly in the process because I made an egregious error or miscalculated, and would come back feeling worse about myself and losing interest in chess. That feeling did not happen today. I was down in material (in a losing position) in all 4 of my games at one point or another, but in the last 3 games I stayed resilient, came from behind and actually won the matches, leaving me on cloud nine leaving the chess club and running home with an extra skip in my step. It's that feeling of victory over a a worthy opponent, someone who could have beaten me but instead I beat him, that drives the adrenaline of competitive people like me. Just like Major League Baseball speeding up its game by implementing a pitch clock, I think chess needs to evolve a bit to attract more players, by lowering the time limits requiring faster moves played with less time to think; the No. 1 player in the world Magnus Carlsen is already pretty much moving towards this by playing less "classic games" which could be up to 4 hours or more, to timed "blitz games" with 10 minutes per side. This is actually playing to my weakness, which is time: I make mistakes when I have to rush moves and think more slowly than others, but it definitely gives chess more of a feel of a real sport with thrilling moves and last-second wins. Maybe the afterlife will be continuous games of 10-minute speed chess.
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