T-12

Ladies and gentlemen—I grow fond of this mode of address—I’m gonna guess that the Priceless Lifers are going to earn their malcontent protestor stripes today. Word on the wire, by which I mean the wireless, is that a big thing is going to come down, and I can’t help but be excited. Who wouldn’t be? Someone other than a desert separatist lunatic might just show a little backbone today. If it happens, and I don’t even know what it is, I’m going to lose my shit. I’m going to dance a jig, I’m going to drink whiskey and chase girls who would think my sons are too old, I’m going to believe again that there is immortality in the passage of human spirit down through the generations. That’s not too much to ask, is it? From the Priceless Lifers? Maybe today they’re going to find out which lives are priceless. Mine I sold a long time ago, and I didn’t get as much for it as I thought I was going to. So I sit here in my spiderweb and watch it all go by, and I tug at strands, and the things that nourish me, the things whose blood I can suck and grow fat on, are the courageous doomed actions of people who have the misfortune to preserve a shred of idealism in the face of the world in which we all do this thing we call living.