A Short Essay...
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2004
A Short Essay on the Essentially Arbitrary Nature of Very Nearly Everything
I would like to confess to having sexual relations with an emotionally-immature person.
She was forty-five years of age at the time, and no more loaded than is usual of a Friday night.
We've been married for twenty-odd years, she seemed to quite enjoy it, and it probably won't happen again for at least a fortnight.
Hardly extenuating circumstances, though, are they?
An earnest Prime Minister once told me that Iraq was a far more dangerous adversary than, say, North Korea.
It must have been true, I reckon.
After all, this man's sincerity is unquestionable, because he rehearses it so dutifully.
Farmers are nice people. They are very rich here in the West. Although they aren't quite as vital to the nation as they used to be, it's not really fair giving them a hard time over this.
They've all earned their subsidies through the diligent machinations of generations of their forebears.
It would be an act of cruelty to judge them according to their modern-day economic relevance, as if they were miners, or something.
Those churlish third-world detractors should jolly well have established their own aristocracies and oligarchies while they had the chance.
A decent and thoughtful lady who chose to espouse certain views was stabbed by a nutter in a department store.
The economic future of her nation was apparently susceptible to those frenzied thrusts of a cheap knife.
I met some good old boys who'd torched the odd n****r when they were kids.
They didn't seem especially contrite, but they stressed that it doesn't happen much these days.
They all go to church Sundays.
That probably explains why they don't need forgiveness.
A tired old man with an enfeebled mind is garbed in white.
He's always being dragged round Eastern Europe in a ridiculous box on wheels.
He is revered by billions.
He tells them that a simple intervention in the germinative consequences of their coital urges is an act of evil.
He hasn't the strength to stand.
He only has the strength to thrash the foam-flecked horses of global destruction in their traces.
I thought about all of these things, and I wondered what they meant.
There were pictures on the television, and airliners were flying into tall buildings.
I'd seen it before, somewhere.
I think I could give that Bin Laden a piece of my mind.
If he really wants to undermine an economy, to subjugate a political ideal, to annihilate a race, then he should do so through the proper channels of democratic advocacy.
There's a Coke in the fridge if you want one.
It's a universal symbol of freedom and peace, you know.
It just goes to show that there's a perfectly respectable traffic in world domination without the need for this terror nonsense.
Yep.
So much is arbitrary, it seems.
I've resolved to focus on those things that are relevant.
To invest in them.
To be a stakeholder.
When all else fails, market forces will protect my interests.
See you in Hell.
