you call this progress

It doesn’t bother me that much going out like a candle. I kind of look at it like just as I will never go to London, I will never go to the year 2100 either. And in a way teenage Ken never died, but he isn’t really quite alive anymore. I have some of his memories but I don’t know where he is.

I don’t see the good in burning in hell for eternity. It’s not like you are traveling the earth or eating Italian beef sandwiches, you’re just in some cruddy hole and you can’t see your hand in front of your face what with the smoke and all, and it’s not like you get used to it after awhile. Probably for you they would pipe in Obama speeches on a loop, and there is no way you are taking old Betsy with you.

The thing is if you were a catholic or a muslim or an Elsdon methodist, why would you want to go into a Unitarian-Universalist church? Well maybe if they have free Italian beef sandwiches in the hands of their open arms. Oh I suppose the hindus and buddhists would be fine, but we Abrahamites are notoriously intolerant types. We Elsdonists wouldn’t like that banging of foreheads on the floor or the playing of bingo and probably nobody else, including the normally tolerant eastern guys, would like our belting out The Old Rugged Cross.

I was kind of tinkering with my own religion for awhile, where Willie Nelson was god, and at the end of times he would look at the mass of saved and sinners and say, “What the hell, you guys may be assholes, but you’re my assholes, everybody is getting into heaven.” And even as the wings were sprouting there would be some of them saying I don’t know why they are letting that other guy into heaven.

You know I am a bit puzzled by your ideas of advancement and progress. You seem to think that this is our job on earth, but what does that mean? Advance how, improve how? I can think of how things are different, but not how they are necessarily better. Certainly we are more comfortable these days through advances in technology, but in our hearts we are still the same mean-spirited buggers we were back in the stone age. Oh, I suppose in richer parts of the world we have the leisure and the full stomachs to behave nicely, but if someone was to take away our stuff we would be banging each other over the head just like everybody else.