Billionaires and dollar-a-day paupers, truck drivers and day traders, ditch diggers and hairdressers; champions and underachievers; politicians and prostitutes, evangelists and pick-pockets, movie stars and lesser bums; first lieutenants, second bananas, and third parties; vacuum cleaner salesmen, court clerks; queens and water carriers, sewage cleaners and roofers, talk show hosts and funeral home directors, car mechanics and computer wizards, addicts and psychiatrists, night club crooners and alpinists, punks and pinkos, true believers and the confused; the challenged and the challenging of every creed and credo - no matter how you fare in the gamble of life . . . your matter is moving - reluctantly as it may - on an unstoppable dissembly line toward union with timelessness.

Sybil the crystal gazer (or whoever happens to man the oracle in your neighborhood) is on safe ground when she says: I see a church. It's late in the morning. Festive flowers and organ music come to me. I hear mumbling about ashes and dust.

The past pursues us like a relentless stalker. The present is but a quick handshake with a passing stranger. And the future? A blank document in an unknown word processor that keeps filling itself on its own. We labor under the illusion that we create the text by touching the keys. In reality, the document writes itself and after a while we recognize for what it is: a decree of fate.

As our progression gradually erases the illusion that titillation, lilac, and laughter, along with satisfying the full panoply of appetites can outweigh the negative, we discover that life harps on a lone string.

The same sun lights up the day, the same moon mixes a little silver with the street light to knead puzzlement into the melancholic boredom of evening sidewalks - from October through September.

No mouthwash can ever remove the weird taste of existence. It's too full of itself to allow space for its complement or opposite. We cannot find nothing. Everywhere we look there is something, most of it is as banal as a one-note symphony, but it is still there.

We cannot fathom what is is!

Half-numbed minds on deathbeds around the world wonder: Why did I have to push a rock up the hill 24,150 times (the average number of days between arrival and departure) to see it roll back exactly that many times? Why did I have to go through all that just to be chucked out at the end, and for good?

It would be a poor sort of life if that was all there was.

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