Election season, at least in the United States, is that time when I’m expected to pick a team.
The downside of that approach, of course, is that I piss off 50 percent of the country.
As a writer, I’d rather piss off everyone.
You can go ahead and call it existential nihilism, if you must.
I prefer to call it something else—the big picture.
To find it, I don’t have to look far—it’s lying on the bookshelf.
It starts here.
…Imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where this is no air, a flag will not wave…
And goes here.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
…Lots of the people [are] mean, and most of them [are] miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
The Answer to the Great Question…Of Life, the Universe and Everything…Is…Is…Forty-two.
Where the vinyl lies, there’s more.
A heart that’s full up like a landfill
A job that slowly kills you
—
I’ll take a quiet life
A handshake of carbon monoxide
—
No alarms and no surprises (let me out of here)
No alarms and no surprises (let me out of here)
No alarms and no surprises, please (let me out of here)
Not to be outdone by this.
I tried so hard and got so far
But in the end, it doesn’t even matter
I had to fall to lose it all
But in the end, it doesn’t even matter
So please, during election season, don’t ask me what team I’m on.
Because we all know the answer:
The Milwaukee Brewers.
