It’s a free ride. It makes me sick. I sit here, wandering if, when, how it will end. Lose responsibility and lose the weight that tethers you here—but is here a place or time or circumstance you care to be? Is the way out a free —truly free— reabsorption into unconsciousness? Sleep this one off, and thoroughly. Why are we struggling so mightily? End this old play. Funny thing; a play who’s subplots are far more interesting than the play itself. Humors and Tragedies swirling about. No reason for seriousness. This world is too light for that. Untethered you’ll be if you’ll let it. And chained to meaning you’ll be without a second thought. You’ve eaten of the tree, bought the serpent lie. Cough that fruit! Spit it up! Laugh at fate and phantasma. Demean the meaning. The most earnest of us is an untrue tyrant; if not to another then in the least to himself. I drink my coffee and read my book and smoke my cigar. What else need there be? A wandering through complications? A competition of automobiles? A slavery for hope of free time on the dock? God damn all of that. God damn the shining lights. Bless us sinners against modernity. Bless the rich in spirit! Bless the readers and their energies spent on love-ghosts after a good death, a good story. But damn this place, these moralists, these Pharisees, and the herd. Long live the joker, the wanderer, the traveling liar, the coyote, the man with the ladder who may visit to sew up a hole in your heavens but only for a coin and a sandwich, not for the king’s seat, the false halo and its painted shimmer. Do not trust him. His means suit him; everyone around you suits you. Best not to fool yourself. Ah, and there is the truth —my truth— you will not be fooled by me, though you’ll blame me with the surety of the Greeks blaming their gods for the exculpation of their passions and wills; you’ll fool yourself. But I have stated my morals atop this masthead: it’s a free ride. I am here for a trick and a treat, a sandwich—nothing more.