the important things in life

Stumbling into the bathroom at 5 a.m., he realized he'd slept a little later than usual. No matter. He had no appointments, no obligations, no kids to make breakfast for, no sleeping lover in the bed for whom he must tread silently and carefully, so as to not awaken her.



The lights came on and Old Dub realized, for the thousandth time, that he took no pleasure from the reflection looking back at him from the mirror. The wiry, white hair surmounting the distorted, unhappy visage wasn't thinning out; "There is that to be thankful for," the old man mused to himself as he swallowed a pill.

As he shut off the tap he could hear the water on the stove boiling merrily, and he was soon sitting at the little kitchen table armed with a small cup of hot black Java and the day's first Marlboro. Knowing that he would hack painfully on the first drag, Dub laid the cancer stick aside and parked his chin thoughtfully between his spotted hands.

"Altogether, it wasn't a bad life." he thought to himself. But he regretted spending so much of his life and energy obsessing and stressing over things that don't really matter all that much.

But that train of thoght naturally led him to the question, "What matters." And in his wise dotage, Old Dub came up with three things: Peace, democracy, and land.

"The Bactrian Inevitability," (One hump or two?), part the first.