Dealer’s Choice
A Long Spoon Parable
Welcome to Existence. Perhaps it’s a pleasure to have you here. Only you would know, of course; I don’t mean to presume. Either way, you are most welcome. I’ve been waiting for you— exactly you— for a long, long time. For all of existence, in fact!
Some call me Hell. I’m a place of fear and cruelty (which is to say, more fear). Here, people are afraid of everything, but mostly difference and death and powerlessness and feeling. Boy oh boy, is Feeling the big scary one!
But rest assured, I can offer an array of distractions from Feeling. Might I interest you in a taste of war, or perhaps a 24-hour news cycle, or a social media feed? If you feel overwhelmed by the precarity and relative inconsequence of your microscopic life, you need only snap your fingers! I am here to swell your sense of consequence. Organized religion might do the trick, or perhaps you care to delve into the world of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. People find infinite ways to play God here. Much easier than grappling with one’s own mortality, I’d say! White supremacy and patriarchy have been popular selections for centuries. It’s important to fear the ones who grow Life inside their bodies, if only to drive home the reigning fear of Life itself, in all of its glorious, unpredictable messiness.
If you prefer a subtler shade of self-importance, might I interest you in wealth, power, surfaces? Yes, I say “surfaces”. I daren’t say “Beauty,” for Beauty necessitates a truthful connection to all things that we simply don’t have time for, in this economy. Which reminds me— Time! It goes quick, quick, quick! Distraction is the name of the game around here, with manipulation as right-hand consigliere. In fact, no need to read any of what I’m saying to you. Too slow! Instead, here are some tiny pictures:
🤖🤑🫵👕🌭🎮🎰🏦🕹⏰
If you are right about that message— and of course you are, because here it is of the utmost importance to be Right— you understand our philosophy. Need I say more?
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Others call me Heaven. I’m a place of endless abundance, where nourishment literally springs from the soil, and a thousand non-human tongues offer up their daily grace. There is enough for everyone, and every one is enough.
Here, the ones who create life with their bodies are duly revered, but not as superiors; for the concept of rank seems but a bridle for the one troubadour’s heart that trills within us all. Worth is measured in connection, aliveness, and rapture. Stuff is… mere static.
People do not fear death and diminishment, for they minnow towards oneness. They do not fashion themselves in the image of loud little gods, intoxicated with destruction. Instead, they model themselves after their fellow creatures: threaded through with mortal pulse, compelled to create inside a brief and cresting life.
Do you care to create, not destroy? Do you long to embrace, not avoid? Then you’ve come to— not the right place, but a place that will hold you. Throw your arms about existence— all of it— and say Yes, I accept this challenge. Deal me in.
Take your time. Here, we move at the speed of trust. You are a hieroglyph etched inside the Great Cave of Existence, and your soul’s baying cry is one that you alone can decode but all will hear. You are here to learn, and to teach— which is to say, to love. You may sing of the dust you are: here at the altar of the unguarded and amnesiatic present, binding yourself in fierce intimacy to the world.
Are you bold enough to feel, to be swept away in the current, to absorb the staggering beauty and inevitable anguish of existence? I can offer you an endless banquet of names for that ache. Call it blues, call it poetry, call it heartbreak, call it soul, call it prayer, call it imagination, call it oxygen. Call it one tree composing its ballad across thousands of years. The red-clay earth, the star-strewn galaxies, the shrouded embrace of time will pulverize your heart until it becomes Everything. Need I say more?
It’s Dealer’s Choice. I’m eager to see what you Make of me.
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