There’s a cultural document with which you are almost certainly familiar that for most of my life has occupied a place central to my cosmogony — the nature aesthetic, the trickster worship, the sharp inhalation of joy that each new moment in life brings. I’ve held this work dear since I was, oh, three or four. And yet there has always been a mystery at the very core of this work, a stream-of-consciousness flow of unintelligible information that informs the text of the work. It is interpreted within the work itself, if a bit unreliably. You can enjoy this work for years — you can understand it very well indeed, for Pete’s sake — without deciphering the mystery.
But the mystery is there, and prominent, and I have puzzled over it almost since I first encountered it. I have tried to work it out myself for years. I have taken my share of lumps in the process.
The other day I realized I had the key I needed to unlock the mystery, right here on my desk.
Here it is, complete with a flaw the authors placed there, expecting no one would ever notice. Feel free to — as they say in the large predator business — help yourself.
I must have missed the flaw, but only because I was drinking tea, which gives me a headache. But you have performed an invaluable service to the world and are hereby awarded a McKimson Medal with Blanc Clusters.
It is possible, although completely unconfirmed at this point, that I snorted on multiple occasions during my review of this particular piece of history.