Keys to the Kingdom

[A]s we travel the convoluted pathways of life, asking ourselves the myriad questions that characterize intelligent inquiry, such as “Why am I holding this golf club?” or “What did the refrigerator say?” we learn that some information is more important than other information, as indicated in these quotidian examples.

But it isn’t the answers we get, it’s the questions we ask that set us so far apart from the apes in the forest, who have no idea what it means to come in under par or fill the ice cube tray or what a toilet is; even the concept of leveraging is alien to them. This is why they remain up in the trees, completely uninterested in the captivating issues and time-consuming tasks that fill our everyday lives right up to HERE.

So when we ask these questions, which may at the time seem strangely unimportant, such as “Why is that shoe up there?” we must remember that there is a reason, even though no one has the slightest idea what it is — professors, popes and imams notwithstanding — and even though the apes may hoot at us with increasing volume from the rapidly shrinking leafy canopy in the illusory simplicity of their monotonous, moviestarless, subhuman, fruit-eating, no-bathroom, golfless, godless lifestyle, just because they were here first.

Do not listen to them. Pay them no heed. They are wrong. Go on about your business with the office windows closed and the air conditioning on, turn up the background music and ignore them; in their simian way they envy your commuter ticket, your shoes, your eyeglasses, your pension, your nuclear energy, your nine iron, your status, your bidet, your freezer compartment your vitamin pills your duplex your two weeks in Bali. You’ve got it all, they haven’t; you can hear it in their lack of syntax. Keys to the Kingdom? Don’t ask.