*image by Ben Harubin

After touring a factory where mystics were assembled,
one man snorted to himself,
"Humpf, it's easy not to care,
if you're not --
going anywhere."
...(Plus, he's expectin' samples.)

The prison system on one planet is such that prisoners are allowed, in their cells,
to have either tapes to listen to or else have the equipment with which to
make their own tapes.
They are also permitted to either enjoy their stay or not.
And furthermore, prisoners there are given the freedom to either escape or not.
...Some prison, huh?

(Back here on Earth:)
There was once a man who'd been blind since birth,
until one day someone told him to open his eyes,
and -- bingo! -- he could see.

"I say, what's that you have crammed in your ear?"
"What?...huh?..."
Okay, okay -- we get it.
(Some prison, huh?)

The naturally produced mind can damn-near make a potentially alert man
So continually distracted and hypnotized as to cause him to despair of ever
achieving his goal. And yet...and yet, without the damn thing, he'd a'never
even thought of the goal to begin with...so, what're you gonna do?...
I said, what're you gonna do?

From his supine position on the pavement, the man looked up and said to the
attending traffic cop,
"I'm not sure of the make, and I couldn't see its license plate,
but I can tell you this, the thing that hit me was absolutely covered in
modifiers of all kinds."
The patrolman then said to his partner, still seated in the squad car,
"Write all that down carefully, then run over 'im -- but be sure to leave
no rhetorical tracks or linguistic prints."
And as his cohort cranked up the big cruiser, he chuckled,
"Ain't you always Mister Meticulous."
And the light on the corner flashed out our moral:
You never know where you're going 'til you get there.
Hey, what're you gonna do?

One man started out thinking, "If I could get my hands on it, I could turn it off," and after many futile years so attempting, began to believe there had to be some secret trick that would permit a man to get his hands on it. So then, for quite a while, he thought,
"If I can just find the trick to it, I can get my hands on it and turn the damn thing off."
And for considerable time he sought said trick, but with no success, so he returned to the beginning of his efforts and reexamined his initial premise, that if he could get his hands on it he could turn it off, and started to roll around in his mind the possibility that it was not possible under any circumstances to ever turn the thing actually "off." And as troublesome as this potential struck him initially, he was forced to
face the fact that it could not be ignored.
When everybody strikes out on vacation, they expect to go someplace pleasant and refreshing, and have their own personal ideas as to how to get there. There is, however, one particular sojourn, regarding which, this normal approach is ill-founded and ultimately impertinent. Count on it.