Not having known hunger, it shaped a sense of necessity. It seemed necessary to acquire multiple appliances. It seemed necessary to be able to discern when a cascade of consequence was accelerating into being and when a cavalcade of ghost-shirted warriors gathered into an aggregate and scattered into a stream.

If you are growing tired of this strict hierarchy and the abstracted flow of adjacent money-functions, knock “a shave and a haircut . . . . All types of experiences come with shibboleths. It is legitimate to gripe and scratch at the wood floors until the bones in your fingers are but splinters.

It is also legitimate to run at a placating pace until the blisters pop and the thoughts slow down.

But here’s the thing - zombies aren’t passive. Hobbes was not born into this world until the lightning strike broke his mother’s water. Pol Pot is not just a character in a song by the Dead Kennedys. Figuratively speaking, there is no rhetorical sleight of hand.

It seemed necessary at the time because we have been trafficking in impoverished concepts of both “seeming” and “necessity” for what feels like forever. Amor fati, agape fati and it is the fattened calf which will end up as your last friend. This isn’t abstract wordplay. No dog, no goat, and the ships’s masts have been full the whole time.