Or, I mean, it wasn’t exactly like that. It wasn’t that simple. I was staring into this giant void—it was like a loading screen in a video game, you know, where you can still sort of walk around as the character but none of the surfaces have loaded and you’re just sort of lost in the matrix—and all of a sudden, right in the middle of the void, I saw myself, sixty years in the future, standing there, naked, looking right at me. I still had all my tats—or at least most of them—but I was like, an OLD man, you know? My skin was saggy as shit, and like, I had all those weird splotches that old people have, and some of my tats had faded really badly, and some I had covered up with other tats or like, well, I guess I must’ve had them removed, and there were all these new tats—so many of them—and I had no idea what most of them signified. There were some that were just dope as shit and that’s clearly why I got them—like, there was this one of an alligator on my neck that was like, I mean, I don’t know if it was Optimus that did it, but if it was, then he really steps up his game in the future—but most of them clearly had all this deep significance that I just didn’t understand yet: It was like looking at hieroglyphics from the future. And it was all a little overwhelming, because like, obviously, I wasn’t just focusing on the tats: I was looking at my body, and I was staring into my face, and the future me, the old man me, wasn’t smiling or frowning or really doing anything at all. He was just there, you know? He was just this person. I had clearly stopped working out, and it’s not like I looked unhealthy or crazy or anything, but I just looked like an old man: I had a little potbelly, and I had that weird turkey-neck thing that my grandpa had, and it was kind of like when you see paparazzi shots of really old famous people on the beach or on vacation, and they’ve got no clothes or like, no hairstyle to communicate that they’re any different from anyone else, and so it just looks like you snapped a picture of some old biker guy, you know, or like, somebody’s dad.

And I didn’t know anything about him—like, I didn’t know if he was still making music, and I didn’t know if he had a family or like, I didn’t know if he was sick or healthy—so I asked him, like: Hey, man. How are you doing? What’s going on with you?

And the old man just kind of looked at me and didn’t say anything.

And I was like: Nice tats, man. When do I get all these?

And the old man just looked at me and didn’t say anything.

And I was like: So I live this long? I live long enough to look like you?