ALL FOR NAUGHTY

So here's the bottom line on life, according to coffee, and delivered through me:

Life is a fucking struggle. From your first breath until your last, it's a constant fight for survival. It used to be that all we needed were clothes, shelter, and food. We hunted and gathered, huddled in caves or built simple structures to shield us from the elements, and fashioned animal skins into makeshift body wraps to preserve the fire that curiously burns in each of us at a very predicatable 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

The problem, of course, was all of the fucking we've done since then.

Now we've got billions of people all over creation wrestling over natural resources, competing for political influence, and fighting for economic relevance. Individuals no longer shelter, clothe, and feed themselves. We count on other people to do all of that shit for us. And we pay them with money we earn doing other things of value. Meanwhile, we keep on fucking - sending the total population higher and higher year after year. And that means more competition for natural resources, land, political influence, economic power, and whathaveyou.

We invent things to make our lives easier, then come to depend on them. Cars, remote controls, microwaves, cell phones, e-mail, ATM cards - you name it. And since we don't need to spend our entire lives hunting for food, building shelter, and stitching clothes, we have a lot of free time to have something called fun. You might say that we, as a species, have worked awfully hard to get where we are today and we deserve to have a little fun.

But there's a little fable about a grasshopper and some ants that we probably ought to keep in mind while we're out on our cruises, tuned into American Idol, shopping for things we don't need, zipping about on thrill rides, and drinking ourselves half blind because life bores us to death: Winter isn't gone for good.

There remains much work to be done. The first frost isn't far off. Will it bring bird flu? More natural catastrophe? Nuclear self-destruction? How will we come to pass? By the heavy hand of something much larger than us - perhaps a wayward comet? By the soft fingers of something far smaller - perhaps a deadly pandemic? By our own undoing - perhaps another world war or glacial meltdown? This is not stuff to worry about. This is simply the work that needs doing now, or all of this fucking we've been doing since the dawn of time will have been, well, for naughty.

Now, if you'll excuse me, all of this coffee I've been drinking is initiating its exit strategy.