Kay

Here comes Kay. I was becoming complacent, thinking that we had passed this era in Pop’s life, that she no longer wanted to come here. How long has it been since her last visit and sleepover? Over a month? It was a good run for me. Pop went over there for the last two weekends, which was the best of all worlds for me. But now the pendulum swings back.

The Lump

Oh, oh, that lump on the back of my left hand, almost at the wrist, seems to be growing larger. It is not a monstrous deformity, but it is threatening to become so. I kind of wonder if this could be the game-ender. I tend to think the worst, being like Pop in that, but one day the worst does have to happen. Life is rigged like that.

Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens takes on the Ten Commandments, offering his proposals for revision. He was never taken up on it.

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What emerges from the first review is this: The Ten Commandments were derived from situational ethics. They show every symptom of having been man-made and improvised under pressure. They are addressed to a nomadic tribe whose main economy is primitive agriculture and whose wealth is sometimes counted in people as well as animals. They are also addressed to a group that has been promised the land and flocks of other people: the Amalekites and Midianites and others whom God orders them to kill, rape, enslave, or exterminate. And this, too, is important because at every step of their arduous journey the Israelites are reminded to keep to the laws, not because they are right but just because they will lead them to become conquerors (of, as it happens, almost the only part of the Middle East that has no oil).

-- Christopher Hitchens, “The New Commandments” in Arguably

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