Escape Is A Consumer Goods Like Another

Any Such Inklings Were Like A Few Scattered Grains Of Truth Dissolved In An Ocean Of Nonsense, And Were Anyway Generally Inextricably Bound Up With Patently Paranoid Ravings Which Served Only To Devalue The Small Amounts Of Sense And Pertinence With Which They Were Associated.

Oh, They Never Lie. They Dissemble, Evade, Prevaricate, Confound, Confuse, Distract, Obscure, Subtly Misrepresent And Willfully Misunderstand With What Often Appears To Be A Positively Gleeful Relish And Are Generally Perfectly Capable Of Contriving To Give One An Utterly Unambiguous Impression Of Their Future Course Of Action While In Fact Intending To Do Exactly The Opposite, But They Never Lie. Perish The Thought.

All Our Lives Are Symbols. Everything We Do Is Part Of A Pattern We Have At Least Some Say In. The Strong Make Their Own Patterns And Influence Other People's, The Weak Have Their Courses Mapped Out For Them. The Weak And The Unlucky, And The Stupid.

Soon Equates To Good, Later To Worse, Uagen Zlepe, Scholar. Therefore, Immediacy.

Stories Set In The Culture In Which Things Went Wrong Tended To Start With Humans Losing Or Forgetting Or Deliberately Leaving Behind Their Terminal. It Was A Conventional Opening, The Equivalent Of Straying Off The Path In The Wild Woods In One Age, Or A Car Breaking Down At Night On A Lonely Road In Another.