Despite your mother/wife/children/psychiatrist’s advice, you purchase your organdonorcycle (that’s motorcycle to those of you who insist on burying your heads in the sand), spin out at 276 mph, bounce off a spreading chestnut tree, and are smeared all over the roadway. The ALS (Advanced Life Support) ambulance rolls up, sponges you off the tarmac, squeezes you out into a sterilized vial, and hies off to the hospital ER (Emergency Room), siren shrieking. The trauma team rushes out, notices that the surface of the liquid in the vial is pulsing regularly, and ships it off to the the Intensive Care Unit,  fondly referred to as the ICU (pronounce each letter clearly, please).

So there you lie, tubes sprouting out of your arms, your legs, your chest, your nose, your mouth, and other bodily orifices I am too modest to enumerate, looking like a multi-tentacled alien monster from a 1950’s science fiction movie. After some weeks, you recover and are restored to your loved ones (unfortunately, also to your hated ones), ready to embark on your next hare-brained adventure. And this process has only cost six-hundred and eighty thousand bucks, all of which was paid for by the people with too little sense to buy their own motorcycles and head off into the sunset, and who instead worked for a living, and paid their Medicare tax and their insurance premiums.

This is progress?

Well, maybe, but it won’t continue for long. It isn’t just the motorcyclists who end up in the ICU. It’s also teenage automobile drivers, bicyclists who insist on driving on the turnpike, skiers who specialize in the quadruple black diamond trails, hang-gliders, bungee jumpers, skydivers, winter mountain climbers, and all the other assorted whack jobs who expect the rest of us to subidize their brain transplants and titanium bone and joint replacements. We are about to run out of money for this application. So what will we see over the next few years?

Let us rewind to the point in the first paragraph where you have just been smeared all over the tarmac. Instead of an ambulance, a street sweeper pulls up, vacuums your remains into its capacious tank, and hoses down the road. The sweeper then proceeds to the canning plant, where its tank will be emptied of you and the other feedstock into the stock tank. It wil then be mixed with natural flavorings, flow through a distribution pipe to the bottling line, and then be marketed as an energy drink.

For all I know, that’s what’s going on now.