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This is a picture of the road that I find myself walking along now. You will note the trees and perhaps you will recognize them and so imagine you know where I am, but you would be wrong. It’s okay to be wrong. I used to think that everything was about exposing nonsense in the world. How did that asshole Wittgenstein put it? To move from disguised nonsense to patent nonsense? Well, turns out that’s bullshit. I thought for a while that we were supposed to make sense out of nonsense and then I thought that we were supposed to try to turn sense into nonsense and now I know that we’re supposed to make sense that sounds like nonsense and then call the sense nonsensical. That’s what I think now. I’ve had a long life of thinking, if not nonsensical things, then particularly useless and annoying things. Like this.

When young I would climb word ladders. Word ladders would get me from rest to trot, from hate to love. Hate, hale, have, lave, love. And therefore I can get from hate to live. But here’s the thing. Live is evil spelled backward, but evil cannot be changed into any other word. Same is true of devil. What’s that all about? I start my fucking ladder with evil and I can’t get a single step up. I’m just saying. God I can turn into sod, pod, hod, and even cod. Good becomes food rather nicely. But evil. You wonder why I wonder. Well, I just do. I’m in a fucking coma. How evil is that?

Pretty evil.

My taking notice of this rather odd fact is not a product of my having been freed from the church. As you know, better than anyone, I was never a participant in the spiritual arts. To their credit I doubt they would ever have let me.

This I’ll take on faith.

Not bad. I mention this because often when emancipated from the religious handcuffs, people don’t go trotting off to rational thought.

No?

No. They embrace every bit of insipid spiritual and psychic nonsense they can find. Crystals and the Cabala and new age voodoo creams and what have you. I guess it’s the nature of human beings. People need something to explain the big bad world out there. Not knowing is not acceptable. Now, I’m going to say something profound. Just giving you a bit of warning. I don’t want it to be missed. It’s only when we can accept our cluelessness about the world that we can approach the manifestation of the inexhaustibility of ignorance and that is art. Did you write that down? Don’t bother. If it turns out to be true then it will only negate what I’m trying to say.