Sometimes I have conversations with others who never specify what we're actually talking about. Because if we did name the nameless, then fact would be involved. And when everything is up in the air, fact has no place at the table. So things and people and places remain unnamed, so that we can talk about everything except what we actually mean. It might seem evasive to some, but really it's a game. How long can we nod and wink and nudge without really saying what we really mean?

Many friends think I revel in this evasiveness. And, more often than not, they are true. When you strip everything down to a base level, then it's easier to get at what you want to talk about. Which is usually the base philosophy behind the decisions being made.

My roommate saw a play on Friday night and brought back a question that has been in my mind ever since:

Would you rather be dead at 30 or fat at 50?

I'll get back to that.

My boss loaned me a copy of My Dinner With Andre, which is basically a filmed two-man play about an "enlightened" mentor and a "slave to the grind" struggling playwright. Much of the film centers on the journey of Andre, who sought to break himself from the world of habit by putting himself in strange and sometimes extraordinary situations. His point being that humans have become robots, mindlessly doing the same thing day after day without actually living.

The playwright, who lives his life by routine and is constantly worried about making enough money to live, points out that he does not feel hemmed in by his somewhat regimented life. He feels happy about living with his longtime girlfriend and doing all of the things on his "to do" list everyday.

The film's resolution to these two philosophies is unknown to me. For some reason, the end of the film was too much for my DVD player. The DVD stopped playing just a bit before the movie ended. I don't know which guy came out of it on top. Or who paid for the dinner--although I suspect Andre did.

My boss likes to occasionally bring up his somewhat hippie roots. He was in the Peace Corps for a few years before entering the marketing world in the late 70s. He met his wife (who was a nun at the time) while in the PC. But for the last almost 25 years he has been a creature of habit, only occasionally changing his location (he moved to Albuquerque from Chicago around the same time I moved here from Clovis) and never changing his vocation (although he did go from having a boss to being one).

In the movie, Andre says that the last gasp of creativity came from the 60s and when that revolutionary time ended, all was lost. We (as a nation) chose to become robots.

I always knew the baby boomers were full of shit. I'll throw another nail on that coffin--you know all this corporate greed we've been uncovering? That's the baby boomers's fault, too. So out of a youth culture that "discovered" drugs, free sex and the Grateful Dead on a mass scale, also came the same CEOs and Wall Street pushers who helped burst the dot com bubble of the late 90s, defrauded millions of stockholders and employees, and are most directly responsible for the current state of the nation--which is not the strongest this nation has ever been.

Now, my generation brought slackers, tattoos and piercings, X and techno, plus much of the youthful arrogance that brought about thousands of start-ups that became burn outs during the heady days of the late 90s. And I'm sure in twenty years, we'll be screwing both our parents and our children so we can have that nice ocean-front cottage to retire in.

The question is "Would you rather be dead at 30 or fat at 50?"

To personalize it a bit more for me (because I am 30), the question is, "Would I rather be my friend who died last November or my boss?"

I would rather be my dead friend. Yes, he was struggling, desperate and didn't have in-house electricity when he died. But he was still trying to live. Not trying to think back on that time when he last remembered being truly happy, some distant far-off fairy land that has morphed into the "best time of my life" dream he spouts off to show he's "down" with the kids.

In other words, it is better to burn out than to fade away. Anyone who argues with that is already dead and will spend the rest of their "life" trying to convince themselves that they aren't. Just like Andre.

Matt Worley wants to have it all, but doesn't want to give up everything you lose when you get it all.