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20ths don’t have the brains of a sow, that’s well known.
Laughter is an interrupted defense mechanism. They’d interrupt their fear of falling so well they could pretend to themselves that jumping out of an airplane was fun.
This is known as the Cosmic Disgust Theory. Or: If you’re going to play games like that, I’ll take my marbles and go home. Signed, God.
Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language.
We were in the middle of a festival known as Christmas, which seemed to take up the whole month of December. There was a big tree decorated with lights, and various other decorations hung around the buildings. Christmas was a time for spending money, traveling, and getting drunk. It had originally been a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, but by the 1980s that had been largely forgotten, replaced by a new totem in a red suit and a false beard. Everyone around me looked quite grim, in keeping with the season.
Many had decided to buy an insurance policy—which actually insured nothing, and was in fact a bet made with a large company concerning your survival. To win the bet, you had to die.
“Life is invariably fatal.”
“The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve.”
I have come to believe, based on long experience dealing with humans, that no true story ever gets told.