I've got a proposition for you;
Logical, positive and brief.
And at least it could serve as a kind of comic relief:
[Refrain]
Let P equal me,
With my heart in command;
Let Q equal you
With Tractatus in hand;
And R could stand for a lifetime of love,
Filled with music to fondle and purr to.
We'll define love as anything lovely you'd care to infer to.
On the right, put that bright,
Hypothetical case;
On the left, our uncleft,
Parenthetical chase.
And that horseshoe there in the middle
Could be lucky; we've nothing to lose,
If in these parentheses
We just mind our little P's
And Q's.
If P [Mafia sang in reply] thinks of me
As a girl hard to make,
Then Q wishes you
Would go jump in the lake.
For R is a meaningless concept,
Having nothing to do with pleasure:
I prefer the hard and tangible things I can measure.
Man, you chase in the face
Of impossible odds;
I'm a lass in the class
Of unbossable broads.
If you'll promise no more sticky phrases,
Half a mo while I kick off my shoes.
There are birds, there are bees,
And to hell with all your P's
And Q's.”
By the time Profane finished his beer, the blanket covered them both.
Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog days began. The world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate. Fifteen were killed in a train wreck near Oaxaca, Mexico, on 1 July. The next day fifteen people died when an apartment house collapsed in Madrid. July 4 a bus fell into a river near Karachi and thirty-one passengers drowned. Thirty-nine more were drowned two days later in a tropical storm in the central Philippines. 9 July the Aegean Islands were hit by an earthquake and tidal waves, which killed forty-three. 14 July a MATS plane crashed after takeoff from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, killing forty-five. An earthquake at Anjar, India, 21 July, killed 117. From 22 to 24 July floods rampaged in central and southern Iran, killing three hundred. 28 July a bus ran off a ferryboat at Kuopio, Finland, and fifteen were killed. Four petroleum tanks blew up near Dumas, Texas, 29 July, killing nineteen. 1 August, seventeen died in a train wreck near Rio de Janeiro. Fifteen more died the 4th and 5th, in floods in southwest Pennsylvania. 2161 people died the same week in a typhoon which hit Chekiang, Honan and Hopeh Provinces. 7 August six dynamite trucks blew up in Cali, Colombia, killing about 1100. The same day there was a train wreck at Prerov, Czechoslovakia, killing nine. The next day 262 miners, trapped by fire, died in a coal mine under Marcinelle, in Belgium. Ice avalanches on Mont Blanc swept fifteen mountain climbers into the kingdom of death in the week 12 to 18 August. The same week a gas explosion in Monticello, Utah, killed fifteen and a typhoon through Japan and Okinawa killed thirty. Twenty- nine more coal miners died of gas poisoning in a mine in Upper Silesia on 27 August. Also on the 27th a Navy bomber crashed among houses in Sanford, Florida, and killed four. Next day a gas explosion in Montreal killed seven and flash floods in Turkey killed 138.
These were the mass deaths. There were also the attendant maimed, malfunctioning, homeless, lorn. It happens every month in a succession of encounters between groups of living and a congruent world - which simply doesn't care. Look in any yearly Almanac, under 'Disasters' - which is where the figures above come from. The business is transacted month after month after month.
IV
