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Ever wonder about the meaning of life? Or where lint goes? Read on.
BY STEVE ALMOND
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The truth is, I am not frequently asked to comment on the enduring mysteries of our age. I attribute this to a couple of factors: 1) A complete absence of historical, scientific, and/or spiritual knowledge. 2) Some very unfortunate hair decisions. Nonetheless, over the past few decades I have been working steadily, and quietly, on a series of revelations that will dramatically expand our current understanding of the universe. In formulating the answers below, it should be noted, I have relied on intuition alone, along with small doses of cough medicine. What will our next major technological breakthrough be? The edible camera. Will the Red Sox ever win the World Series? Yes. When? The year after you die. What does the "33" on the Rolling Rock bottle mean? Christ died at 33. On the third day after his death, a rock was rolled away from his tomb, and he rose from the dead and appeared to his third disciple. Later, in his 33rd epistle, Paul excoriates the heathens for "consuming excessively the fruit of the vine" and urges them instead to "abstain from drink, excepting cheap, watery American beers in green bottles." If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The short answer is yes. (It makes the sound of a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.) The more basic question is whether reality exists independent of human perception. Immanuel Kant famously considered this age-old question. His formulation was a bit cruder (loosely translated from the German: "If I break wind and no one is around to smell it, have I broken wind?"). Kant eventually reined in such speculations and concluded his inquiry with his often overlooked 11th categorical imperative: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, who the hell cares?" Why does James Brown dress that way? A significant faction of his female fans find the polyester stomach bulge sexy. Did God create man, or did man create God? Both. Man created God, then God erased man’s memory and made him think he was just a helpless schmo who owed his entire existence to God. Where does lint go? It is eaten by tiny elves on a bed of orzo and later regurgitated. The resulting substance (graknuut) is knit into letters by elfish women, which are then used to compose the scripts for the Lord of the Rings films. Are people born gay? No. What happens is that the devil decides to inhabit certain little babies and changes their brain chemistry so that they want to have sex with people of their own gender. In fact, what they really want to do — despite what they might say in polite company — is to find innocent Christian youngsters of the same gender and have sex with them. The eventual plan of the devil-possessed homosexual lobby is to take over the human race and redo the entire interior-design scheme of all cultures on earth. This plan has, heretofore, been somewhat hindered by the fact that homosexuals cannot breed. Can a woman get pregnant from a toilet seat? Only if the toilet seat ejaculates inside her. Why do Buddhists say life is suffering? Actually, the early Buddhists responsible for aphorisms went through a grueling round of focus groups before settling on this maxim. Other possibilities included "Life is that which comes before death" (too obvious), "Life sucks, then you die" (too unrefined), and "Life is a cabaret, old chum" (too campy). What happens to the soul when we die? It joins with all the other souls to form the largest doo-wop band in the world. Where does evil come from? According to Freud, evil is the distortion of love. Allah, the God of Islam, states that evil is born of insolence. Dr. Phil more or less backs Allah up on this. The question is: are we born with the capacity to hate and destroy, or does it emerge as a result of our interactions with the world, and specifically the ways in which our mother often forgot to feed us for hours at a time and to change our diaper, and sometimes locked us in a room alone with a hungry pit bull? The answer here is that evil, like certain forms of the flu, is actually a free-floating virus that tends to seek out particular hosts, such as conservative talk-show hosts, and settles in their inner ears. What, exactly, is "holy shit"? Holy shit is the fecal matter of any consecrated saint, patriarch, or messianic figure. The authenticity of said fecal matter is generally accepted by religious authorities only after an independent taste test. Why do guys love sports so much? Because they suck at feelings. Where is Jimmy Hoffa’s body? I ate it. Is Kobe Bryant innocent or guilty of sexual assault? Innocent! And I, for one, can hardly wait until America learns the truth. In due time, the facts will show that the alleged victim, upon arriving at Bryant’s room, forced her way inside, bent herself over a chair, then forced a virtually helpless Bryant to have intercourse with her until she sustained injuries consistent with sexual assault. She then willfully and maliciously smeared her blood on the inside of Kobe’s T-shirt and smashed her jaw into Kobe’s hand. She also pretended to cry. The cheap cynicism of her actions simply underscores the dangers faced by major sports superstars such as Bryant, who will now have to spend at least one percent of his weekly endorsement income on clearing his good name, while the so-called victim goes around bragging about her injuries to the tabloids. What is the meaning of life? There is no single "meaning of life." This is a myth perpetrated by those who are into having long, profound, drunken, and grindingly boring discussions of the sort that usually signal that the party is pretty much over. Any other questions? Steve Almond can be reached at www.stevenalmond.com
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