The point would be of course to keep going. After all to let such a talent go to waste would be so much worse than seeing it die young. Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful annuity. How much better could it be? It’s almost nepotism in reverse. You get to hate your parents by making them famous. Think of how much energy that takes up. How many other really useful things you could be doing, some maybe also a little beneficial? Who knows? The possibilities are limitless.
There’s no shame in a little profit. Even in a pure bartering system there’s allowance for that. Everybody knows that somebody’s getting a better deal. The difference between ideal and actual capitalism is that in one case, each party thinks it’s them that won the deal, and in the other case, both parties think the other side won. They of course would both say that for both sides to be happy about that, either way, is socialism. But let sleeping dogs lie, I say.
So you keep going. Always something to prove to somebody, after all. Stuff upper lip. Someone is always going to find a yardstick that someone else just casually left lying around. These things happen by chance, right? No way you’re basing your conduct on some wildly pejorative control based stereotype used to prevent actual human connection. That would be some high level mind control shit, right? That’d cost a few Teslas, wouldn’t it?
It’s not wrong to say that’s not much of a point. That’s fair. That tenuous bit of wispy possibility nonsense is not a solid foundation for any kind of social improvement project, be it political, educational, motivational, vocational, spiritual, or correctional. But it’s something. If you can identify a touchstone in today’s world that everyone recognizes as the same thing, regardless of how differently it may symbolize or be manifested as something(s) quite more or at least more manifest, then you’ve really got something, haven’t you?
Not sure what that something is, but I think it has something to do with keeping on. Darwin suggested that natural selection provides an organically motivated means for limiting the overwhelming, exuberant, explosive, and completely self-absorbed energy that any species feels just upon realizing it is alive. The law of the jungle. Not actually the law of the jungle, but how a non jungle dwelling white man saw a system where he might not always win. That’s where laws come from, you know.
It’s like that old question the Shadow used to ask, “Who knows what Evil lurks in the hearts of men?”
Evil is in your mind. And it gets on your tongue. Then it gets in somebody’s ear. Then it’s in another mind. And another mouth. Then in somebody’s fist.
Or you could just spit it out.
Nothing is not an option. Nothing is what’s left if you make the wrong choice. It’s all that’s left either way. But losing it isn’t that big a deal.
Nothing lives forever. Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything.
That’s why you keep on keeping on. Because what else you got to do?
© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
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