What is the cure for life?
Sometimes you have to stop and rethink everything; occasionally the stopping goes on longer than it perhaps should, but eventually things sort themselves out through the sorting is seldom what you expect. We are emerging from a period in which there didn’t seem to be much that we can do beyond keep our heads down and try to believe that things would pass. We elected a new administration on a platform of hope, but found ourselves confronted with problems that made hope seem almost irrelevant. Now there’s a feeling that we should do something, say something, respond in some way, but then we read something like Escape from the Zombie Food Court and realize that the problem is far more fundamental. Beyond that we realize that anything we might say, has quite probably already been said, and said far better than our own meager talents allow. And we follow that thread for a while until Zo reminds us of The Better Man and that Chris Locke is and has been obsessively writing what threatens to become a book. But that doesn’t make sense until you’ve read Liar Liar part one and then part two. Somewhere in the midst of all of this you remember quite clearly encountering
but now for the life of you you can’t remember where; not that it really matters because you know it’s not a book you’re supposed to read but one that you listen to with pleasure while drifting off towards sleep or watching television so that a line resurfaces and after a moment or two you ask Shel, “What’s the cure for life?” And she looks at you like you’re not quite bright and says, “Living.”
