Grab your things

 
"A man once made a hypothesis," I told my friend Randy. "He said that humanity can never be allowed to discover the meaning of life, or else life as we know it would end."

Randy scratched the back of his head, evidently deep in thought.

"Think about it," I said. "If you suddenly discovered the reason why you are here, and you aren't particularly pleased with that reason, what do you think would happen?"

Randy's hand moved from the back of his hand to his chin, and he looked up at my living room ceiling philosophically.

"Well," he said, "I suppose gun sales would skyrocket."

I squinted my left eye and looked at him skeptically.

"Uh huh. And why do you suppose that would happen?"

Randy didn't answer. He continued staring upward, stroking the spot on his chin where his goatee used to be. He had shaved it off for a job interview.

I inspected the ceiling, attempting to discern where exactly he was looking. I saw a bump in the plaster underneath the blatantly gray paint. I saw the spot where I had smashed a bug many months ago and left a dark brown streak. I saw beams of sunlight angled into wavering lines through my window.

"What are you looking at, Randy?"

"I'm not looking, I'm thinking."

I directed my gaze back down to him.

"Okay, well did you hear what I asked you?"

He stopped stroking his chin and stood up from the couch. He began pacing back and forth in front of the television. Tiny flares of static electricity erupted from the carpet with confusingly resounding crackling sounds. Randy constantly dragged his feet when he walked, so any time he took his shoes off it was inadvisable to go anywhere near him.

"It seems pretty simple to me," he said. "We're here for whoever comes after us. Our ancestors worked to make life better for us, and the purpose of our lives is to make life better for our children and grandchildren and so on."

I had never seen Randy in such an intellectual fervor before, so I leaned back into the sofa cushions, slightly wide-eyed, and let him do his thing.

"And you might wonder, then why isn't everyone employed as a scientist or a doctor or whatever? And the answer to that is simple, too. Support staff. So really, pretty much everyone plays a part, no matter how small."

He stopped pacing and turned to look at me.

"Makes sense, doesn't it?"

I thought about it for a moment. It did make a lot of sense. I wondered if anyone had ever come up with that explanation before. It seemed way too "common sense" for any of those religious wackjobs to have originated it. Could it be that we had actually discovered the meaning of life? I stood up and held up my hands.

"It makes a little too much sense, Randy," I said. "We need to keep this to ourselves. If the rest of the world finds out, who knows what could happen!"

As it turns out, Randy didn't take my advice. With the sweet adrenaline of discovery pumping through his veins like acid-laced jet fuel, he rushed out of my apartment before I could stop him and hopped on the subway to the Fox News building on 6th Ave.

Gun sales skyrocketed.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Arcade Fire, Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)