A few thoughts on Monday morning (AUG 28)

Let’s make a movie about gloomy people falling in love.

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Do you think that you could earn a lot of money selling heroin in Paradise? I assume that nobody would care to buy from you, because everyone’s so naturally blissed-out there. FIRST, you need to fashion Hell on Earth, and only THEN can you begin to sell your drugs. But you’ll make very good profits, at that point – enough to finance various agencies that can enforce the status quo. For, thenceforward, the tricky thing will be to effectively prevent people from improving their situation.

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If you’re going to speak the world into existence, why would you begin with dichotomies – light and darkness, water and land? And why follow steps (the creation of whales and birds on Thursday, then cattle and humankind on Friday)? Why not have everything simply pop into existence and appear at once, like a Polaroid snapshot of the 1980s, complete with credit cards and tennis shoes? If such a jumble’s instantaneous materialization was forborne on account of distastefulness, then why permit the 80s to exist at all?

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Imagine creating a human body by saying “Let there be blood,” and then squiggly veins appear slithering on the earth, squirting redness haphazardly. So you say: “Let there be flesh to surround all this gore like an amphitheater, and a heart to fight the brains.” But then you would need to construct a skeletal system, lest your sculpture end up resembling a big baggy worm. Give it legs and arms; then remove them on second thought.

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Nations settling the land and clashing with their neighbors. Always fighting. “You can’t stop war,” people say. I guess the argument is that if you cooperate, share, and harmonize, then someone from the other side might eventually take advantage of your trust; so the smart move is to lie, cheat, and steal before anyone else gets the bright idea to do so. If evil must exist, then at least let US embody it. The worst-case scenario would be to find that you are truly wise and compassionate: then you’d be guaranteed to lose – you’d get slain before you could utter the word “diplomacy.” Once you’re reborn, I hope you learned your lesson and are now a hardened criminal.