PROLOGUE:

Herb: In the known universe there are beings that never quite question their existence. They wander wildly through the underbrush of society, slowly strangling the life out of all within their grasp, including themselves. It’s senseless. 

 

DIALOGUE:

Charlie: And so it begins, our journey … our wandering.

Ivy: I wonder … will we wander in vain? Is there a point to all this creeping about?

St. John: About our destiny,  yes. And, we must have faith in our function, our purpose, our very reason for being.

Charlie: Being that you know so much about life, the universe and everything, don’t you think it’s about time we questioned our existence and that which drives us?

Ivy: What drives us is life itself. Isn’t it? 

St. John: It is! Our very existence demands we kowtow and bow to the will of what we were born to do.

Charlie: Do tell! We are slaves to our wills then … or the wills of our nature … and after we do whatever it is we are supposed to do then what happens? What then?

Ivy: Then? Why does it even matter who we are or what we do in the grand scheme of things? Only our purpose is the thing that …

St. John: The thing is … it’s not in us to question such ‘mandering’ notions … we must accept life.

Charlie:  But life presents many challenges to us.  

Ivy: And challenges are but learning opportunities. No?

St. John: Yes! And opportunities are often squandered, if not explored.

Charlie: Yet, the exploration of one’s inner self must take precedence over inquests into superfluous matters of our mundane existence.

Ivy: Unfortunately, our existence is what allows us to look within.

St. John: Still, within each of us lies the strength to change the world around us to such an extent that we too are transformed. 

Charlie: Bah! Transformation or mutation? You are suggesting we conform … or we are forced to conform.

Ivy: You call it conformity; I call it ‘sense of community’. You obsess about repression.

St. John: He represses, or perhaps suppresses, his inner fears. He prefers to be anti-social with his creepy thoughts. You sir, are  a blight on society!

Charlie: Well, society has much to fear, I’m afraid. If individuals like him … perhaps like us all, don’t have the wherewithal to face our anxieties, then we will eventually spread disease-like and eat each other alive, staring with ourselves. 

Ivy: Wait. Without ourselves, there will be no one left to eat any others.

St. John: Others? There will be no others!

Charlie: Exactly, the others will have already been eaten! 

Ivy: Eaten by whom? You are suggesting mass suicide… or at least cannibalism. Self nihilism of epic proportions. You are proposing …

St. John: His proposal has less to do with cannibalism and more to do with …

Charlie: With self negation to the power of infinity! Cannibalism? Indeed! I’m talking about a slaughter of the subconscious.

Ivy: … or conscious. Any conscientious objectors?

St. John: I object to this whole line of discussion and its very pretext.

Charlie: (incensed) Weed whacker!

Ivy: Stop strangling the conversation!

St. John: Creep!

 

EPILOGUE:

Herb: We are often plagued with the wild and senseless. By the time they burn themselves out, they have wreaked a path of destruction through all that was once hallowed. In time, life begins to grow again and our ordered society is reclaimed. Eventually however, chaos and anarchy return and spread, often unchecked. It is inevitable that this dilemma makes many question their very existence.

It seems that for all our philosophical and sociopolitical musings about utopia … it is always dystopia that eventually snuffs out all our best intentions. Suicide, homicide, genocide, menticide, liberticide, logocide, pesticide, herbicide. To disarticulate each from all, existence eventually brandishes one of its many forms of ‘weed whackers’. It’s senseless.

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