Orts #681

Money is dehydrated mercy. If you have plenty of it, you just add tears, and people come out of the woodwork to comfort you.

The War on Drugs might as well be a war on glaciers, with the soldiers armed with ice picks and smoking joints.

Imagine crossing the North Atlantic, whether on an errand for good or evil, with only the restless winds of the planet to get you where you next wanted to do your thing. How's that for science fiction? And now we have automobiles, powered by the most addictive and destructive drug yet discovered, which is gasoline. Yes, and in one eensy-weensy century we have sucked the last drop of petroleum from our planet's sweet flowing breast. For what? For an orgy of transportation whoopee, friends and neighbors. For shame! . . . The farts of our internal combustion engines have wrecked the atmosphere . . . . How's that for science fiction?

     -- all, from rants by Gil Berman, protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut's unfinished novel If God Were Alive Today (2000), published as the second part of We Are What We Pretend to Be (2012)