And even though I could see Mandy so clearly—like, even though Future Mandy was coming in loud and clear—I found myself thinking: What’s gonna happen to me when I’m that age? Where am I gonna be when Mandy’s looking like this?

For all the time I’d spent in the video game trying to figure out how I got here—like, trying to think about all the other people I could’ve been if I had made different choices or if I had walked into different situations—I hadn’t really spent any time thinking about the person I was going to be. I’d thought about whether anyone was gonna be listening to my music a thousand years from now, and I’d thought about how all the stuff I’d already done was gonna be remembered or if it was gonna be remembered at all, but I’d never actually thought about what I was gonna be like when I was fifty, sixty, seventy years old. And it’s like: Why not, you know? Why didn’t I try to make a video game about THAT? Was it just because I’d been so locked into the moment, so focused on living in the here and now, that it didn’t seem worth my time or my energy? Was there some part of me that didn’t think I was gonna make it that far, or that the whole world wasn’t gonna make it that far? Or was it actually something deeper? Was it actually that I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that all the work I needed to do, all the stuff I was here for, was happening right now—the golden age of me being able to be this guy, live this life, was happening right at this very instant—and so if I could see what the world had in store for me, I would just be like: Fuck it. What’s the point?

But I was feeling kind of … I don’t know. I guess I was feeling kind of inspired by how brave Mandy seemed to be these days. I was feeling like if it scared me so much to think about this shit, like, if I was so worried about what I was gonna see when I looked into the crystal ball, that meant I had to do it. And, like, maybe my life was about to unravel. Maybe if I thought about it really hard and I was really honest with myself, I was gonna see something that was so clear and so convincing that I couldn’t unsee it.

But I was there, and I was feeling brave, and so I entered into the space of total possibility. I submitted the question to the universe: What’s going to happen to me? Who am I going to become?

And the universe answered back with this naked, saggy, tatted old man.

LOL.