I know you’d rather wouldn’t, but the time has come to deal with it. Unless you’re under 30, in which case stop reading now! This post is not for you and I suggest you go and read my post “In Praise of Drunkenness”, which is much more worthy of your time. Come back when you’re old.

Now back to you, dear mature reader. We both know that this entire business of dying is rather unpleasant, and no doubt you would prefer to go and watch the game instead, or shopping or something. Unfortunately, we don’t get a vote. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but you’re going to die very soon – you see, in cosmic terms our whole life cycle is no more that the batting of an eyelid.

To all the big shots and important people I say: Stop taking yourself so seriously! Before you know it you’ll be a speck of dust, and if you keep up your self-important attitude you’ll look pretty silly to other specks of dust around you.

But there are of course also serious aspects to dying, which require careful consideration. It is extremely important not to show up at D-day unprepared. For one thing, your kids will be pissed when they discover that trying to make head or tail of your papers is a nightmare and that you never wrote down the password to anything. Various appliances, bank accounts and what nots have stopped working because you (always a stickler for proper security procedures) refuse to release passwords to them over the oouja board.

I have made my own decision: I am all in favor of the quick fix. No long and tedious preludes to my departure that would inevitably turn me into a bore. A tap on the shoulder from the chap with the sickle will suffice for me to take the hint. But I still have to deal with the aftermath. My desk is a mess since at any given time I work at ten different projects. I, too, am concerned about cyber safety, so sometimes it takes me hours, if not days, to reconstruct a password I urgently needed yesterday, from crumbs I’ve cleverly left all over the house. The moment I’m gone, cyber hell will break loose for my dearest and nearest, so I must organize, and I must do it now, because you never know…

In research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at McGill University in Montreal have established the direct link between the elation stimulated by music and the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is the same substance that puts the joy in sex, the thrill in certain illegal drugs, and the warm feeling within a woman breast-feeding her child (read the excellent report by Joel N. Shurkin, here).

I wasn’t thinking in terms of dopamine, back in 2006, while planning the release of my SF novel The Odyssey Gene, but one evening it dawned on me that I knew a song that almost exactly fitted the mood of the book. It was Too Late, by the amazing musical duo Fisher. Music can express moods and even colors, so why can’t a song be a powerful tool to tell an audience what to expect from a book?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I simply had to act on it. After much head scratching and hesitation I wrote to Kathy Fisher with an appalling proposition: I asked her to let me meddle with her lyrics so as to link them even more perfectly with my book. I then asked her to re-record the song with the expanded lyrics. I wouldn’t have been surprised, or upset, if she simply told me to get lost but, instead, both she and Ron, her husband (the other half of the duo), came on board like true sports. The result was Too Late – Odyssey, which you can download here. The lyrics below show my additions in red:

Too Late / Odyssey