57R34M #286

“ I speak to you now as a man who survived the bird flu. I acquired the lethal, human-transmissible H5N1 from looking at a turkey at a farmer’s market in north Essex. For weeks, I battled the deadly disease, bedridden, close to perishing entirely. I could hear the Grim Reaper using the toilet and everything. Manfully, I beat the bird flu off, with no help at all from my partner and daughter, who declaimed throughout my entire, hideous ordeal that I did not in fact have the bird flu at all, and it was just a cold. They mocked my inferior male immune system – further weakened by a lifetime of drinking and smoking and a brief period of eating human adrenochrome as a morning stimulant – and generally spoke as women do, which is to say they complained about how men make a meal out of having the sniffles. ”

“ We can only think certain thoughts because of the kind of language we use. If we get a thought that doesn’t fit into language we’re apt to think we’re having a mystical experience — unless we know where we got the drugs — but otherwise, we’re inclined to think it’s a mystical experience if it doesn’t fit into language. Therefore, language delimits us.

(…) There’s a natural tendency built into the Indo-European family of languages to divide things into “either-ors,” probably because we have two hands. Nobody realizes the influence on human philosophy — up in the highest levels — of the fact that 50,000 years ago children started playing the game of grabbing a rock, putting their hands behind their back, and then holding their hands out and saying, “Guess which hand I’ve got the rock in?” There’s only two possible choices, there. It’s gotta be in the right hand or the left hand. We’ve been so conditioned by that in the last 50,000 years that we think everything has a right and a left, or a true and a false. It’s a terrible shock to us discover something which the Orient discovered 2,500 years ago, or more, which modern science has just discovered in this century; namely, that most of the universe consists of maybes. There are very few things that we can hammer down into definite yeses or nos. ”

“ If You Build It They Will Come only actually works in Hollywood films. Everywhere else, If You Build It And Don’t Tell Anyone About It No-One Will Go There And It Will Be Abandoned And Will Rot Right There And Eventually You Will Find Hobos Fucking In It. ”