Here comes the summer heat again. We open all the windows every night, then close them when we get up. This works quite well. I haven’t yet been on the roof to flush the cooler or replace its pads. Even more delinquently, I haven’t yet installed our window screens, so while the house is cooling off each night, we’re making lots of new six-legged friends. In other words, the house is full of bugs, and in the morning, in the sink, I’ll sometimes even find a roach or two. (I’m gonna puke.) Although I wake up earlier than she, I leave the cockroach killing to my wife, who is, by nature, primitive. She grabs them little buggers by the butt, and, howling like a cuspidor, dispatches them ferociously, the same way Jody Arias stubs out a cigarette.
The ants are our most numerous new friends. They’ve found a way to come in underneath the sliding door. I leave the vacuum cleaner there and chase them all around the house with my long, throbbing tube. These particular ants seem more conscious than most: when they perceive the high-pitched whine as I descend on them, they freak, like foot soldiers hearing an enemy aircraft approach. Alas, for them there’s no escape. They’ll soon repose eternally in dust, beside the dried-out bodies of their kin. You have to wonder what it’s like for them, sucked up the whining silver tube of Death.
A month ago or so an Oklahoma “monster twister” killed a couple dozen people living in its path. We got to hear the stories of the people who survived as they stood sobbing in the ruins of what were their homes. All that remained was shattered, worthless trash. I don’t know about you, but to me tornadoes seem like Evil personified. Perhaps anything truly terrifying seems evil. Only problem is—gee whiz—I don’t believe in Evil. People who prate about Satan make my horns itch. I’d like to strangle their ignorant, superstitious asses right on the spot. A friend of mine and I (he’s a retired engineer) are working on a vacuum-cleaner truck— a giant hose and mammoth tank— with which to transport fundamentalists. We presume they’ll be easy to capture, because they’ll assume it’s The Rapture.
Some philosophers reject the notion of two distinct forces, Good and Evil. They define Evil, instead, simply as “An absence of Good.” I’m cool with that and hope they’re right. I’m O.K., too, with those who propose two equal opposing forces. But those who claim that there are two forces and then smugly assert that “The Good always wins!”, those particular folks get my goat. What evidence is there to say that goodness always wins? Have you not read or watched the news since 1922? The outside world—as you well know—is crooked and corrupt. It is within ourselves that Good and kindness always win. The other stuff within us is derived from fear and greed.
I’d like to be stoical about destructive forces, yet am unnerved by current astrophysical research, which indicates that Black Holes and “Dark Matter” account for 97% of the known universe and are thus the most powerful forces of all. Black Holes are mind-blowingly, pants-wettingly consumptive. They can swallow solar systems whole, bones and all! Compared to puny twisters only half a mile wide, they are to tornados as tornados are to my scrawny Hoover. Our minds are not equipped to process this. It don’t compute.
Good and evil are two sides of the same coin, like love and marriage. The helix of your DNA and vortex in your toilet bowl are cousins, don’t you see? In that sense you have sung “Hosanna,” every time you pee. (Or when you flush!) As should be clear, you cannot have one pole without the other, the way you cannot have a dad if you don’t have a mother!