Salutations, readers. I am a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Or am I? Aaaah, that is the question. Do WMDs like myself exist, or do we not? The President spends much of his precious time insisting we do. Others spend just as much time insisting we are nothing but figments of his imagination. We find ourselves caught in a limbo of existence, neither here nor there, neither real nor unreal, neither oven roasted nor extra crispy.

What does it mean to "exist" in the deserts of Iraq, or in the jungles of the human mind? If I do exist, why have I not committed mass destruction? What is mass destruction, anyway, except the inevitable conclusion of a sequence of events that began with a fondling miscalculation at the Costco toilet paper pyramid, yes, just one tiny squeeze, it won't all tumble down to the hard, cold cement wharehouse floor like rain made of tightly rolled double-ply, will it? Oh yes, it will. And somewhere in the jumble of soft little cylinders, somewhere between the angry fat woman with the oversized shopping cart and the teenager pushing samples of bagel pizzas, that is where we come closest to understanding the full breadth of our existence or absence or intermittent insertion into this low-rent universe of ours.

We ponder the range of possibilities. We embrace alternate quantum realities, some in which we do exist, in large piles, gift-wrapped for George, and others in which our absence is felt like the emptiness of an open can of spam, its meatlets long since consumed by ants.  We embrace the quantumness of the daily news, in which each broadcast gives us life or sucks it away.  Will George find us? Is there anything to be found? Is the finding the thing, or is the looking enough? Every journey, they say, begins with a single step. Perhaps George is early in his journey, and we are waiting many miles down the path, cleverly hidden behind an Iraqi 7-11, covered in Al Slurpeee.

This has been a Pesky the Rat Philosophical Interlude. For more Weapons of Mass Destruction stories, click here.

7:07:55 AM