My father, now dead and buried, used to joke when his children left the house to play: Write if you get work!

There’s nothing but the blackest residue of humor left in any gibe like that for anyone I care about. There’s no joke left in nearly anything for me anymore. Decent people don’t joke about cancer in a funeral home with the corpse and the family present.

I can spot no class of squalid self-interested behavior that hasn’t been perfected, never mind tried, by the legions of invertebrates, possessed of no souls and negligible intellects, that lord over our affairs, great and small — affairs they should be ashamed in their ignorance and sloth to even comment upon. They know nothing of steel and wood and earth and sweat, just the faint yellow musk of ink and paper and the weight of  the great, stolen seals of an empire gone shabby in their pockets.

Hoard gold. Amalgamate pixels. Cultivate politicians. Mine clauses. Weasel patents. Stripmine people, and sell them into a titanic servitude for them for a trifle for you; but no matter what, don’t allow anyone to do anything. A whiff of perspiration on the breeze –even a hint of duty — disturbs the International Brotherhood of Lotos-Eaters.

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
The Lotos blows by every winding creek:
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:
Thro’ every hollow cave and alley lone
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.
We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
Roll’d to starboard, roll’d to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl’d
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl’d
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying
hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning tho’ the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer–some, ’tis whisper’d–down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

Tennyson