HEFNER BACK, IT SAYS HERE. TO DEFY DEATH

NBC is bringing back Hef and his Bunnies. None of them would quite put it this way, but what they're really saying is: Life's a big bowl of ice cream, and we're lapping it up before it melts. Melting as in death.

OK, I admit death isn't what the young-and-vital who blog here wish to talk about. After all, there are rhapsodic autumn days coming up. Crackling with the colors of life at its best. And yet...!

Isn't autumn nature's magnificent funeral? Isn't what's happening now the great splash of color just before the bleak death of winter? And along with winter so many other little deaths in life. The gut-wracking loss of those who you loved...the webby loss of consciousness as you slip into an anesthetic sleep...the gauzy loss of this world as you dream into your sleep-world at the end of the day.

Now don't lose me here, folks.

Each of these is worth a website all its own. But for now, the main sleep is The Big Sleep. How does it come? What does it feel like? Especially, where does it take you? Now don't lose me here....

From the burial mounds in Asia to the pyramids of Egypt to the catacombs of Rome, we know our ancestors felt strongly the way most of us do today. There's something more out there. Something more than the proverbial three-score-and-ten years. Hindus see an eternal oneness...Jews an eternity in the memory of those we leave behind...Christians an eternal heaven...Muslims an eternal paradise.

The operative word is eternal. While we're on this side of the Big Sleep, our minds can shape that eternity and our hearts can desire it anyway we wish. On the other side....? Well, like they say: No one of us has ever come back to report. However, most of us assume the trip has a one-way ticket. No matter how young and beautiful and rich, at the end of the line there's no fare back. Not even for the playboys. Those last five seconds are not a comma; they're the exclamation mark.

Centuries back our shamans and clergy and philosophers advised us there was the "right" way and the "wrong" way to write that exclamation. We were given great commandments, great laws, great books. By this century there's a competing way to write it. If you listen close, you'll hear it in the new Playboy series:"If it feels good it has to be right; if it feels bad, it has to be wrong."

Exclamation mark.