Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

This is a story about a wise man named Milo. It begins on the day he was eaten by a shark.

If that isn't an excellent start, i don't know what is

Petting dogs was good for people; it was a scientific fact. Burt was a wise man, too, in his way. All animals are.

Time was a swamp inside a giant washing machine.

Hell, maybe he was schizophrenic. Maybe he had a brain tumor. (You don’t have a brain tumor, a voice told him. A former doctor.)

“The trouble with problem solving,” Aldrin often complained, “is that too many people are making money off the problems.”

Everything that’s happening was preventable. The whole last sixty years has been like watching our business leaders drive us all toward a brick wall without ever trying to turn or swerve.”

“Art can encompass both social responsibility and questions of beauty.

That was the first thing about learning anything worthwhile; you had to have patience. You had to know that if you tried to do a thing a thousand times, you could usually succeed in doing it, and if you practiced that thing a million times, you could do it very well. And so on. Mastering a thing was not magic, just hard work.

“When people try to destroy art or thought,” Milo explained, “it makes all forms of art and thought valuable. It’s a slippery slope once we start saying what people should or shouldn’t see. It’s a real evil, a thing with substance and power. I was helping to preserve people’s chance to see and to choose.”

Teaching is more likely to be a fine art when a passing grade means you don’t get your ass blown off.

Some economists, Milo noted, went around saying that if you helped rich people get richer and didn’t make them pay taxes, eventually that would help out the poor people, too. “That’s the economic version of Bigfoot,”

Milo came to understand that a great many holy men and others who seemed wise were, in fact, just out to get your money.

When the Master himself came to town, it was like Jesus entering Jerusalem, except Jesus hadn’t been invented yet.

Perfection is being happy with what you are right now.”

If everyone agreed to suffer pain or death rather than be treated unjustly, greedy people could never again gain power.