Interlude: (Mr Trout, I Think, Figures in to all This)

Everyone on Three

One

Two

Three

So it goes.

The line is sarcastic. I'm sure you knew that. It's meant to be a vinegar enema, meant to flush out any illusions we may have of a just and orderly world. The world is not as it is meant, life is not as it is meant. We are under no obligation to accept our places, either as individuals in society or as a species in the universe.

Justice does not come from appreciating the order of things, but by realizing that the nonsense you imagine when you blink isn't imaginary at all.

Why should I mark the passing of an eighty four-year-old broken-down stranger? Because it was as unjust as all of our deaths. Young or old, violent or "natural". When one realizes how disingenuous, how fraudulent this blessing of mortal consciousness is, that is when one can feel true compassion. Compassion for the stranger, the loser, the criminal, the enemy. All of our standards of success, achievement, virtue, become irksome necessities at best and murderous lies at worst.

The human essence does not lie in victory, monuments, anthems, tradition, profession.

It lies in a three-year-old boy, running towards a sprinkler on a summer's day, laughing at the joy of running, and than getting hit by a shock of cold water, and starting to snivel.

It lies in the same boy, a ninety-year-old man now, dying on his couch in the house he bought sixty years ago. Wailing, allowing himself to wail for the first time since he was a boy, wailing at his pain, at his weakness, at leaving his great-grandchildren before they form personalities of their own, wailing for his own grandmother.

And it lies in his youngest granddaughter, twenty five, who has always known full well that she would outlive him, sitting by his side, holding his hand, they wail together.

That scream, those deep stuttering breaths that become broken roars, that is human.

Take that sound, remember it, it's coming. Take it to your family, your friends, and everyone you meet, and fight together. Breathe the summer air. Take the time to lie in bed in the morning and enjoy the meld between your body and a half-awake brain. Than wake up and say good morning to the first person you see. Invent something, a thought if nothing else. This is enough. Think, about everything, until your own universe gets turned off. You will lose of course, but you won't be a traitor. Which is what you will be if you accept the order, the standard, the material, the fatal, the nihil.

Listen, there are no scales, there is no great thread, there is no central trunk. Listen.