I was reminded of this piece today… I thought I’d lost it in a computer crash, but a little digging in my back up files uncovered it. Originally written in 1997, it shows that some things never change.
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Lord Distractor’s beeper went off. He was needed. Again. Sometimes, he reflected, it would be nice to just take some time off, lay on the beach, perhaps read a trashy novel. But, there was work to be done. Someone was headed toward a cliff, and it was up to him to prevent them from going over it. Lord Distractor sympathized with his subjects, really he did, but he couldn’t just let them run off, willy-nilly chasing rainbows and doing whatever they damn well pleased. They’d be bound to get into trouble that way. Actually, he was doing them a service by preventing them from encountering the awful truth. He was a very enlightened despot, when you looked at it that way, insulating his subjects from any harm that pursuing silly dreams might cause them.