Dear loyal readers:
Last month marked the 7th anniversary of Straight Up with a Twist. I haven’t missed an issue since this column started, so I’ve decided to take this summer off and re-print some of the classic SUWAT columns from the first year. I’ll catch up with you in the Fall, when there will be a new addition to the Bruns household in the form of a baby boy (that my wife is VERY ready to deliver). The column below is titled “The Clock is Ticking,” and it first appeared in the November, 1998 issue of the Arcadia News.

I was playing with my calculator the other night, trying to see how many different words I could spell with numbers. We’ve all done this right? You enter some numbers and then turn it upside down to see what it spells. After spelling "hell" and "hello" (the only two words I could spell in sixth grade, too), I decided to do something else with this marvelous machine that recently punched out my abacus as the primary number manipulation device in my household.

I became a little displeased with the abacus after I used it to calculate the total portion of my current student loan payments that are going towards the beer I drank in college. There’s nothing quite like a government-subsidized loan. There’s also nothing like making monthly payments on beer you drank five years ago. I destroyed the abacus after the unusually high figure presented itself. I figured the beads must have gone bad.

Anyway, I input my age into the calculator and divided it by 75. The answer reflected back to me: .41333333. I was completely shocked and thoroughly disappointed. 75 is the average age that a American male will reach. That number with all of the threes in it is the percentage of my life that I’ve already lived.

I laughed nervously while I re-entered the digits. I was certain that I had made some sort of mistake. More than 40% of my life is over? How can that be? I was just born, like, yesterday. (People ask me that all of the time: "What, were you born yesterday?")

I started thinking about all of the things that I have accomplished during my forty-one percent. Scholastically, professionally and socially, I think I’m an above-average specimen. I’m not a Nobel Prize runner-up or anything, but I’m not a candidate for electroshock therapy, either.

I suppose I’ll be picking up the calculator every birthday and lamenting about my new "percentage point." Wailing away like a little child at age 74: "I’m at 98%!"

Check out www.deathclock.com on the internet. After entering your birth date and your sex, a screen will pop up that tells you the exact day that you will die, along with how many seconds you have left to live.

There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as staring at a countdown timer that shows you how much time until you expire. It made me feel like there are so many things that I do that could be construed as a serious waste of time: flossing my teeth, watching "Friends," stopping at red lights, talking to people, etc. With the seconds ticking away on the computer screen, I felt like I was really, really wasting my time. So I went to bed.

Granted, there’s no medical or scientific accountability with the "deathclock," but it is a great reminder of how fragile and precious life is. I suppose if we all really knew the day we were going to die, we’d behave a bit differently. If you wore a deathclock on your wrist instead of a watch, how often would you check it?

Standing in line at the DMV would become a completely new experience for everyone involved (including the workers) if everyone knew the exact moment of termination of their lives. I can hear people now, screaming about how they’ve only got "315 million seconds to live!" Then, someone else snapping back: "What?! That’s ten years. I’ve only got six! I’m going next."

Of course, it would sure make it easier to come up with excuses if you had a deathclock on your wrist. If a friend asked you if you would like to join their "moving party" next weekend (you move all of their heavy junk and they treat you to a couple of hot dogs and some not-quite-cold beer), you could just peek at your wrist, gasp and say: "I really don’t have the time."