Should You Live in An Unserious Society?

Correspondence 2

Chee

As I read this. I am sitting on a rooftop in Sarasota, with the top 100 pop songs of the 2000’s blaring from the speaker to my right. The sky is drenched in opaque grey hues, lying low over lower lying land, with strange roads named “Alligator Alley”, and “Snake Pass”.

The three men standing behind the hotel bar wear turquoise guaveras, oakley sunglasses perched atop overgeled hair, trucker caps, and speak in an English slurred by their tenure under Castro’s Cuba.

It will be difficult for me to paint mankind as more noble than an Oxford Comma given the circumstances.

You ask why participate in a society that you find offensive?

Why participate indeed?

I suppose the only answer I can provide, and the only one that I’ve ever taken seriously, is that life is good. Life is inherently good, life is uplifted by the good.

Chris’s mother trips and smashes her head into the back of a parked car while buying lotto tickets on a wednesday night, and dies alone in the car lot of a 7–11. There is video evidence, and Chris watches this happen from the vantage of a fuzzy security cam. Life is good. A child is taken by a coyote from a backyard in California, the night is broken by sobs and mourned by the lingering ghosts of Sharon Tate and her unborn child. Life is good.