DON’T LISTEN TO YOUR SNOUT

A morning dispatch from the mechanical animals

Hope you rested well, a joyous, restorative sleep, where the angels adorned you with garlands of happiness and such optimism that even great mountains ran to the oceans, as the sheer force of the positivity was too much for them.

My god, the mountains said, Rachel is at one with this glorious planet of perplexing, not to mention pulsating, contradictions.

What can ever have happened?

Is this the end of the universe as we know it?

Then a little family of stoats, mother, father, and little ones, looked over at her.

That Jimmy is a trickster, they said, he’s tricked Rachel into being the happiest woman in the world, and now the mountains have run away.

The Father stoat said, “Mountains were not a lot of use anyway. They’re too steep. And there’s little oxygen at the top if you’re fool enough to climb them. Not that we would. Us stoats have too much common sense — unlike the humans.”

One of the baby stoats said, “Humans are so silly. They can’t see the nose in front of their faces.”

“That’s right,” said daddy stoat. “But they aren’t all sleeping robots. Take Rachel, she sees so much, but she misses one key thing.”

“What is that, daddy?” Asked baby stoat.

“She can see the nose in front of her face, but she still listens to it.”

“Ah,” said baby stoat. “I am only six months old, but I have learned that lesson already, not to listen to my nose, or technically speaking, my snout.”

“Very wise, my boy, very wise,” said daddy stoat. “Listening to your snout will only lead you up the garden path.”

The nose is the closest thing we see.

That doesn’t mean we have to believe everything it tells us.

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