The part of the dead Keith Richards will be played by Captain Jack Sparrow and Katherine Hepburn.

I was thinking the other day at 3 am (my wife tells me that’s my biggest problem), and I imagined the most impossible of impossibilities, the death of Keith Richards.

Listen. Put yourself into the shoes of a network news executive. Richards. Dead. How do you play the story? What does the little anchor girl read into the camera? “Rock icon breathed his last last night.” Or “Keith Richards has finally had his last laugh on the whole effing world.”

See, there’s no way an element of humor won’t invade the story. A Richards funeral done from first to last with a straight face by all involved? No way. Jagger will be guffawing through the whole proceeding. Charlie Watts will be smirking and giving sidelong glances to the smartest looking babe in the press corps.

I forgot the part about lying in state at Westminster Abbey. There he is. Dressed up like Prince, only a hundred years older, with a smoldering cigarette still bitten between his teeth, and a guitar sticking straight up from his ancient crotch. People pass by and they leave their honest gifts to his genius, bottles of Jack Daniels, bags of heroin, vials of cocaine, supermodels, and plenty of female underwear. Matt Lauer won’t know what to say.

Everyone will be in tears during the Recessional.

Relax. He’s not dead yet. He’ll probably play his own damn Recessional.