Be Unprepared

At the entrance to the Metro, on rainy days, there stands a guy selling five dollar umbrellas.  They're the shoddiest merchandise imaginable--one good gust of wind and they invert and go sailing from your hand into the sky, never to be seen again.  He does a brisk business.  It's a wonder we've never purchased one.   People who cater to the unprepared are familiar with our face. 

We've always been unprepared, ever since birth.  We emerged from the womb without so much as a single set of clothing.  Be prepared, say the Boy Scouts.  We say fuck that pack of ready for lifers.  We've never been ready for anything. 

Our idea of proper preparation is drinking lots of coffee.  If you can't be ready, be wired.  It aids in the manufacture of instant excuses.  We start every day with a redeye (a large coffee with two shots of expresso dropped in), move on to several Starbucks double shots, and then top it off with another large coffee and another Starbucks double shot.  This is the liquid equivalent of a crystal meth high.  We're a caffeine tweaker. 

Expect the unexpected, they say.  We can't even expect the expected, how are we supposed to foresee the unforeseeable?  Man may be a complex animal, but we're a simpleton; we're lucky we can put on our pants without an instruction manual.  We stagger, blindfolded, from one disaster to another.  So how is it we manage to bring an umbrella on rainy days?  It's one of those miracles they talk about in the Bible.  Except most of those miracles were faked.  Take the burning bush.  Just out of the frame of Moses' vision, there stood a guy with a can of petrol and a zippo.   

Comments

[Jan Martin Löhndorf]

Unprepared and unforgiven, that's the way - downhill, that is.

[UF MIKE]

Unforgiven--that's the word that sums up human existence.

[karoline]

i love Carl Sagan's smile, and that voice its like mannah from heaven! ooops, what are we taling about?

[karoline]

insert a k, thanks!

[UF MIKE]

I know nothing about this Carl Sagan you speak of. Except that he knows things about science, and is a vampire.