Perhaps some of you recall the 1983 movie The Hunger, adapted from a book by the horrormeister Whitley Strieber. In the film, Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie play glamorous New York City vampires. Very cool film, by the way — the first scene alone was worth the price of admission. It opens in a nightclub to the strains of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus. There they are, Bowie and Deneuve, who even in real life appear to be ageless — terminally chic in their shades; cool, sleek predators trolling the place for their next vic. It's one of those gothy-punky NYC clubs where everyone looks like a ghoul anyway. The place is packed with young beautiful people who seem to be simultaneously mocking and worshipping death.

Deneuve plays an ancient vampire who is beautiful, ageless, and immortal. She's lived for countless centuries. Every 200 years or so, she selects a "life" partner and turns him or her into a vampire, too. All is blissful — even though a lot of mortals have to be sacrificed along the way for their blood feasts — and her partners live a century or two without aging a day.

The problem is that eventually her partners do age and disintegrate, but they don't die. At this point, she puts them in a mausoleum in the bowels of her Manhattan mansion and visits them from time to time. They are still alive — barely — and she still "loves" them, but being a serial monogamist, she moves on to the next partner. But of course, at the end of the film one of her new would-be lovers (in this case, Susan Sarandon) manages to turn her into an old shrew before destroying her once and for all.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that there's probably not that many people who could handle the notion of living forever. For one thing, everyone you ever loved would die, and your health — well — maybe not so great. And more to the point, what would it be like if you had all the time in the world to do — well — anything? (This notion, by the way, was supported by a recent poll I read in a New York paper which said that the average age people wanted to live was, like, 87 or something. Very few wanted to live to see 100.)

If organisms could exist without a struggle to survive, I think there would be very little progress or evolution. Part of the life force involves a fight to get what we need, whether it be food, or love, or sex, or recognition, or money, or a clean toilet. The needs become more sophisticated and complex as we move up the food chain. My boyfriend BG's cat, being a cat, has simpler requirements. Food, fresh water, a clean place to shit, pigeons in the window to vex her, and some love and attention are all this kitty needs to be happy. Well, except for the fact that being an indoor cat with no real access to any mice or other wildlife to hunt, every evening she does a mad crazy dash around BG's apartment. After reading up on cat behavior, I've learned this is normal and necessary. A housecat must do this because her instinct requires her to engage in some hunting/chasing/fleeing activity that she cannot satisfy for real in captivity. In other words, her life is so cushy that she needs to let her hair (or fur) down a little and pretend there's some reason to dash madly around the safe, secure apartment where she needn't hunt for her dinner or flee from dogs with an attitude.