What’s next for dear old Ed Koch?

“Death!” he told the Transom, with trademark glee, in his midtown office last Friday morning.

“I’m 85. My father lived to 87. The average American lives to 78. I’m already living on borrowed time, but I have no fear of death,” said the former mayor, who famously bought a burial plot at the nondenominational Trinity Church in 2008. (“I didn’t want to go to the traditional cemeteries; they seem so overgrown with vegetation. This one is very well cared for.”)

In the meantime, Mr. Koch is trying to put the fear of God in state legislators.

Last spring, he presented all of the Albany hopefuls with a set of pledges-one in support of nonpartisan redistricting, one for a fiscally responsible budget and one for a package of ethics reforms-and, as of last week’s deadline, he had cajoled an impressive 280 candidates into signing his pledges, mostly by threatening them.

“I started calling around and telling people we’re very serious, we’re going to put ‘Enemy of Reform’ over your head on our Web site,” he said. And, while many have tried and failed to clean up Albany, his efforts seem to be working. “I didn’t think we’d be so far ahead as we are today.”

This week, Mr. Koch is pushing the pledge campaign-called New York Uprising-a few miles further, embarking on an upstate press tour to shame publicly some of the recalcitrant legislators in their home districts. At press conferences in Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester, he’ll stand with the local signatories (“Heroes of Reform” as he calls them), next to oversize posters with pictures of his Enemies.

“I didn’t willingly take this on. I was waiting for someone else to do it. I mean, it takes a lot of time,” said Mr. Koch, who still delights in penning movie reviews and has lately begun casting his many opinions out to his 600-plus followers on Twitter. “It’s only after six months or a year of going to every breakfast, lunch and dinner, where all they talked about is the dysfunctional Legislature … I’m thinking somebody is going to stand up and challenge this in some form. But nobody did. So I said to myself, ‘Well, if nobody will, I will.'”