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A Prayer for Perpetual Malcontents Lord, clear my mind before I begin. I feel a viscous fluid coagulating in my brain, slowing the circulation, depriving that thinking organ of oxygen, causing it to function in a manner that seems out of kilter or, at the very least, unproductive to the completion of tasks of a merit upon which You and I might agree. Because, to my limited knowledge, the only liquid that should be in my head is blood, I ask, Lord, for nothing less than total exsanguination, followed, perhaps, by a transfusion of an inviscid, synthetic replacement, less susceptible to fouling. O Lord, hear my request for that which I deem impossible, only because the possible seems so lacking in appeal. I accept the label malcontent in its most general terms because I understand the flaws that plague me in my present situation are no more antagonistic than the presumptive flaws that my imagination assigns to accompany each of the alternative circumstances to which I might reasonably be expected to flee. It is a ridiculous thing to pray for deliverance from the petty torments of an infinite number of parallel realities, all equally objectionable. Lord, hear the ridiculous prayers of the malcontents, who through the mundanely mysterious and inexcusable mis-threading of chromosomes and experience, are satisfied no more by the imagined than by the real. Invoke a technology beyond imagination by which You draw the poisoned humor from the body. Concoct a miraculous remedy beyond the dreams of medical practice through which the blood is cleansed and returned laden with divine properties. Invent nothing less than an impossibility in which the malcontent, who denies all peace, may yet find it and prove, repeatedly, unable to discover the means to taint it. |
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A Prayer for Perpetual Malcontents David Keffer Knoxville, TN October 22, 2014 |