Life's Pleasures Quote by David Gerrold

Gerrold takes the oldest human fear - annihilation - and makes it funny by treating the grave as a customer-service timeline. The line moves like a nursery rhyme with a switchblade: short, blunt sentences that stack indignities one after another, each “Then” landing like a shovel hit. By the time you get to “worms,” you’re already laughing partly because there’s nothing else left to do.

The specific intent isn’t just to be morbid; it’s to puncture the self-important ways we talk about “meaning” and “legacy.” Gerrold, a science fiction writer steeped in big ideas about time, biology, and entropy, drags the cosmic down to the physical. No glowing afterlife, no heroic arc - just process. The joke is that even our final humiliation arrives with a kind of procedural mercy: at least the sequence is orderly. That last sentence is the twist, a mock pep talk that exposes how desperate the mind is to find a silver lining, even if the silver lining is “the worms wait their turn.”

Subtextually, it’s a critique of optimism as a coping mechanism and a defense of gallows humor as clarity. Gratitude here isn’t spiritual; it’s logistical. You can’t bargain with mortality, but you can choose your stance toward it: flinching denial or sardonic acceptance. Gerrold offers the latter, not as nihilism, but as a bracing refusal to lie.