As you wait in line for your Vanilla Bean Steamer (so good!) this morning, please consider the following:
1. Cold cuts and other cured meats contain nitrates which, when combined with artificial sweetners such as those found in diet sodas and chewing gum (of which aspartame is the most common), create a type of carcinogen only two short chemical hops from that found in the tar of cigarettes. That Quizno’s sandwich you’re pointing at your face may as well be a phaser set to Slow, Painful Death Measured in Chemotherapy Sessions.
2. The odds of winning the lottery jackpot are one in just under fourteen million. You are as likely to see ‘heads’ come up twenty four times in a row while flipping a coin. But, much more interestingly, you are twice as likely to be attacked by a shark; four times as likely to be struck my lightening; over two-and-a-half thousand times more likely to die horribly in a snowy highway car accident.
3. If you were alive just one hundred years ago, the odds that you’d survive this winter would fall dramatically. One surmises, then, that your continued existence has largely to do with being born during, what we consider today, ‘the right time,’ and little to do with any natural guile or ability to survive you may presume you possess. That is until one thinks of how our lives will be viewed one hundred years from now, when they’ve discovered both the cure for cancer and car crashes, and that the trick to infinite longevity is to combine aspartame with cigarette tar. We are but footnotes in the history of life’s futility.
4. For the reasons of whatever cultural inadequacies, the manner in which you die, if not your death as the marked lack of you itself, can only be viewed as either humorous or boring.