Tuesday, November 20, 2007

How life in your universe confirms my insanity or, the answer to 42 across in last Friday's NY Times crossword puzzle.

So last night I was watching Monday night football. Leading handily in a somewhat dull game, I was glad the Denver Broncos found a team they could beat. Then came a commercial break and the reaffirmation of my mental instability.

Treated to a birds eye view of a Lexus LUV (that's a "luxury" SUV), we watched as the vehicle screeched and squealed over and over in a circle cutting "doughnuts" in a teenage cloud of dust and rubber as a voice proudly tells us, "Yes you can, no you shouldn't."

Touting the horsepower of four times the average American's IQ, I was left struck wondering, "in this age of declining oil supplies and carbon dioxide emissions sealing humanity's darkening destiny, just who in the fuck is this commercial designed for anyway?"

But there's this Lexus, just a big overpriced, over powered, glorified family "station wagon" for Christ's sake, and they're using it like a pre-licensed 15 year old adolescent idiot without regard for scarce gas and rubber, abusing the vehicle and the environment just because "you can"?

Leaping for the remote, I slammed the damn TV off as I pondered what I had just witnessed. Like so many things today are prone to do, it left me questioning my sanity when suddenly I recalled a quote I had read several days earlier: "A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die."

Immediately recalling where I had read that, I abruptly sprang up in search of last Friday's New York Times crossword. It was a clue to that puzzle! The answer had unexpectedly come to me.

"Understanding as a wish to die" was something said by Franz "Kafka." It was the answer to 42 across. It took nearly four days, but thanks to a little patience, my insanity, and the makers of Lexus, it came to me.

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2 comments:

enigma4ever said...

see this is why you need a lexus...

D.K. Raed said...

"Yes you can, No you shouldn't" could be the BEST advice ever!

Re: Kafka ... reading The Trial was so depressing, it made me depressed, and that is a hard thing to achieve. I still get depressed even thinking about it. He really captured the nightmare of fighting bureaucracy in a police state.