After a pause, Yippee looked down at his plate, and said, “You
know, these Indians have the right idea. If you’re going to eat the
same meal every day, you might as well make it spicy.”
I only looked at him blankly.
“I’m trying to be metaphorical here,” he said. I shrugged and
returned to my food.
It was wonderful to have Yippee back in my life, although I had
a feeling it wouldn’t last. I decided to put my trust in his story on the
back burner until something more substantial than a hung-over
interpretation of a snippet of overheard conversation emerged from
the broth of his banged-up brain.
After we finished gorging ourselves at the restaurant, Yippee ran
off to a class where he and twenty other people were supposed to sit
in a room and laugh for two hours at nothing at all. He insisted that
it was actually very enjoyable, the only problem was that everyone
else seemed to take the whole thing so seriously.
It seemed that coincidences like this—running into Yippee
thousands of miles from where I last saw him—were springing up
everywhere in my newly-itinerant life. It seemed that the more you
traveled the smaller the world became. Oscar hit on this idea during
the Bangladesh Airlines flight: when you travel, you adopt the
qualities of a high-trajectory, spinning molecule—you crash into
everything. So far I hadn’t been hurt by any of the collisions.
That night, during the Omniraja’s speech, I searched for Yippee, but
he was nowhere to be seen among the endless sea of white robes.
The shaggy sage bellowed: “‘Once blasphemy against God was
the greatest blasphemy, but God died and thereupon these
blasphemies died too. To blaspheme the earth is now the most
dreadful offense.’
“What does this mean children? What did the genius of
Nietzsche have in mind when it fashioned this statement? Did he
mean that God forgot to look both ways before crossing the street and
was hit by a speeding chariot? Did he mean that after so many years
God finally just died of old age? He certainly looked old in all those
paintings. Maybe it was just time for him to go to God heaven, and
imagine how wonderful that must be! Unfortunately for God, that
isn’t what Nietzsche meant when he wrote ‘God is dead.’ He was
referring to the notion that a God only exists on earth if people
believe in him, and with science and technology here to explain the
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
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