The world must go on but you mustn’t. You surely mustn’t do any damned thing. You must? Must? For god sake’s why must we do anything in particular? Must we buy televisions and the things they sell us? What a devious ploy, a salesman in every home. Must we go on pretending with our striving? Aren’t we tired now? Have we no shame? Piss and vinegar we are full of as my grandfather told me, when we are young. Love and hate and spite and desire: these drive us, and mad. No thing we must do aside from eat and drink and laugh and play and love and make babies and live. These we must, absolutely. The remainder of all of this, with the niceties and fanciful things—these are what we mustn’t—buffers against the knowledge of death, all and only. And the show, the world, it spins and so as it goes on must-ing in its own way, we may simply choose solace, lying down in her green grasses, rolling in her sun, and wrapping our loved ones in warm blankets of earth. This we must at some juncture do, and better by choice and in forgoing the striving pleasures, than to have striven all the days long and missed our day in her warm arms; why effort so much in avoidance? Why make the devil out of death? When we cannot go on, best to remind ourselves that we mustn’t. There is no divine imperative, no mandate upon our heads to run faster from her inevitable arms—and are they so cold? Colder than flat screens of empty trance making? Have a roll in the lawn, a splash in the pond, and sinking deep into the dark bottom. Why not look to a good death rather than the fearful life of hustling and ultimately pointless toil? The show must go on, but we mustn’t.