In the end, one of two things generally happens.  Your heart 
rises up and attacks you in a kind of right wing palace-putsch 
by your loyal lieutenant.  Alternatively, you might be struck 
down by the bad effects of some left-wing cell in your body 
convincing his prole neighbors to join him and become a fast 
growing tumorous entity. ("It's the only way to get our fair 
share of the nutrients are currently being stolen by the host 
organism.") I occasionally hear about someone shuffling off 
his mortal coil by being crushed by a sixteen-ton weight (so 
marked) a la Wiley Coyote, but that's rare.

What happens before any of these events (and ever so slightly
after) is life.  Re-reading my note from start to here makes 
this all sound vaguely depressing, but, in fact, the whole 
set-up turns out (barring bad luck) to be a pretty good deal.  
One can get a lot done, if one is so inclined, and enjoy quite 
a few discrete experiences before the gong sounds.

So, um, having said that, I haven't done much yet that is 
suitable for chiselling on my gravestone but I have enjoyed 
doing it.  My two-year-old daughter can weave a ten-minute 
story about eating a Cheerio that is illuminating (the story, 
not the Cheerio). My wife and I build a house (I mean this 
is the bourgeois sense that someone built a house for us to 
our specs and we flung pelf at him) in Portland (where we 
live; how convenient). Never do that again.  I've been with 
the same tech company (Intel) for seven years now, which 
entitles me to tell old-timer stories ("We used to make chips 
out of wood. Options could be traded for warm pelts...")

In the next five years, I'm hoping to learn Italian and 
win the lottery.  If time permits, I will also get bar-mitzvah-ed.  
My email is er@gollyzoom.com