LIFE: ¿WHO IS WITH ME?

As best as I can tell, life is
intolerable. Oh, not always of course. A case can be made for all the big
wonders and little blessings and blah, blah, blah. But when you really boil it
down, our entire existence rests on a few really ugly premises.

First, life, and by that I mean the
big life, life with a capital L, must ingest other life in order for it to
remain life. Or, put another way, in order to witness the miracle of creation,
we must continually eat, and then poop out, a little bit of that miracle.

Second, one of the charming side
effects of sentient life is emotional pain. The fact that dead and fermenting
plant life creates alcohol - a terrific anesthetic for emotional pain - might
cause one to think that this is, by nature, a compassionate universe. Think
again. Keep dulling that pain with booze and you wind up, if you're lucky, in a
church basement sharing your tears with complete strangers. If you're not
lucky, you wind up on a waiting list for a liver.

And finally, there is the ever-present
knowledge of death. In order to "more fully appreciate the gift of
life," we all get to ponder a violently sudden or slow and agonizingly
painful descent into oblivion -- after which our beloved bodies turn into the
stuff of nightmares. Which brings me back to my original premise: life is
intolerable. But rather than go gently into that creepy night, I've decided to
start a petition to protest the fundamental conditions of existence. I know
it's not much, but it's a start.

So who is with me? 


Who wants
their voices heard before they are dead and your vocal chords are being eaten
by a swarm of disgusting bugs?