Did you know that French vodka utilizes zig-zagging glass tubes feeding extraordinary contraptions, milling wheat to a fine powder, sieved in remarkable vibrating machines and married with the water of deep limestone wells; de-mineralized by double-reverse osmosis, corkscrewing downward counter-clockwise into a dizzying vortex of grey mist bottled in etched glass and streamed into goblets, effectively making hangovers obsolete?

 

This I think, is a fine use for science.

 

Long ago, in the war of a thousand tears, the elders surmised that terrorism was more like reaction poverty than invented evil, and that if they truly wanted to end it they must invite it into the kitchen.

 

This ushered in a golden quantum age. The Manhattan, Mai Tai and Martini commanded the genius of the downsized molecular fizzicist,previously mixing cannibal cocktails for wall-faced generals, stiff and starchly gray, who themselves were demoted to avatars for mayhem simulations.

 

(Hell, even they had enough). 

`If we aren’t killing hostiles anymore,

I’m watching the game,’ they harrumphed.

 

While epic poems were composed over waves of meringue, the machines hesitated at the front and wondered if their time wasn’t better spent in astronomy, for even machines have dreams, electric though they are, and filled with chromatic waves of frequency.

 

This hesitation startled the napalm peasants, peeking from thatched shacks and shuddering in disbelief.  And perhaps it was then that they realized that war is just a bad dream whispered into the ear of a sleeping man, and when the man wakes, the dream dies, and is no more.

 

`Let’s not speak of it again,’ the soldier cautioned, biting into a chocolate-dipped macaroon.  `Even the greatest villain of the cinema needs belief to survive, for belief is the engine of creation, and no plane can bomb a city without an engine.’

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From The Opulence Of Invention. Copyright © 2018 E. P. Mattson, All Rights Reserved.