Counterfactual

This place is where I write, and it is a dangerous place. What you see as fact is almost always fact, and yet it must be hedged around to protect the innocuous and innocent. However, the hedging-about is itself a danger to such. What then should the writer do, since all is danger? There are two solutions: to not write (which is a lot like not breathing) and to warn.

So I can speak freely, since it is the morning of the day itself. But I must warn that what I say is hedged about.

At this point, as the sun rises in some distant realm of the peaceful ocean, it is around midnight where the College of Wyverns stands. It is a cold afternoon at Burnley, where the Gunners have just triumphed in a lackadaisical manner. And the results of the Great Examination are free over the cables.

Yet I am bound. Master of rituals, observer of rites, keeper of archives and writer of rhymes, I am bound. I cannot tell what is already free. Which leaves me to ask the questions that nobody will, since I do not know the answers. Whether it is true or not that half a legion can find the answer to the life, the universe and everything (or even more) is unknown. Whether it is true or not that Hooke's law (F=kx) was violated is also unknown.

Why is it that we must grub and dig for scraps of information when it is so free, so rich, so useful and ameliorative of stress? Why should young people be made to rub their troubled brows when a moment's largesse would set them at liberty to laugh and love and have a life? Are we indeed so cribbed and cabined, bound by saucy doubts and fears, that we must deprive others?

My grand-uncle said it well, that old and crafty gnome. This is what he said. And perhaps although his light has long since dimmed, its ancient residues might illumine your path a little, as it has mine. I am Number One Goat and I bow to the four corners of the earth (as Barry Hughart might have written), unknowing, innocent, a sacrifice to the craftiness of the powers above and the powers below.