On a small planet in the Oxygen Network Nebula, there was a man named Janet. Don’t ask, it was a Polish name that was spelled even less effectively in English.
Janet had two wives: Tate, who lived in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Tontina, of Hanover, whose motto was “surely you gesticulate!”
The wives were blissfully ignorant of each other’s existence. Tate was arguably the more modern of the wives, leaving Janet some wiggle room to arrange his comings and goings. Indeed, Janet maintained that since he was an adjunct professor at two different institutions of medium-to-higher learning, he had to travel and in some cases sleep over in different places. It was also highly convenient because Tontina, being more traditional, as she said, insisted that according to her astrological chart she was subject to occasional Wacky Wednesdays or Fucked-Up Fridays. On these days, she would scream, break plates, and annoy the neighborhood dogs. Janet believed her when she said she was going to rage, and tried to not be around on those days.
Is it easy to whittle an academic career out of the solid granite of New Hampshire? That depends! Although at first poor Janet might seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place, remember that this is New Hampshire, not Vermont. Some folks genuinely have such a hard time getting through snowy mountain roads that they de facto limit themselves to their local area. Thus, Janet could write peer-reviewed articles in one part of the state espousing radical Free Free Somewhere and then drive to his other institution and publish something else defending a completely different position.
Surprised? This can be explained by one humble theory: Libertarians don’t believe that fact checking should be an obstacle to life.
If you go snow-shoeing through the wilderness, all the while composing pleasant haiku in your head, and whistle while you work, perhaps you will be greeted by a nine-tailed fox. Or maybe, just maybe, your whistling will cause an avalanche. Many dream of a White Wedding, but not a White Funeral.
Who would miss me more, mused Janet? He could visualize Tate smoking a clove cigarette and sighing, yes, I loved him, for 7 years, and that surely has to be weighed against all the time I didn’t know him, not to say that I didn’t love him then, but I was incapable of loving him fully. And then she would ash out and, while coughing, think of the lingering love she, might feel for him two marriages on from now. Such is life and death.
Tontina, after having been told, might, instead of breaking things, put on her work gloves and, using Krazy Glue (trademarked item, never a disparagement) glue pieces of different objects together in a novel way. If life is going to go on, we must rebuild. So what if a piece of the Lighthouse of Alexandria ends up in the wall of a government building. We must reassemble. Did she even suspect that, in this way, she was even more like Janet? Janet, who, through the art of love wheedled pieces of different women, could make a new world, or at least a kind of map that resembled Settlers of Catan?
Long Live Janet! We all owned a fraction of him, just like the people of Green Bay are shareholders of the Packers NFL franchise.