91: Temperance

We pamper the goblins that hover like flies over our meals and sticky fingers. A little goblin presses a vein in your neck while you’re driving in heavy traffic. Your face is red. While you’re sitting in a pew in church a goblin pokes you in the ribs and sticks pins in your thigh. A goblin puts words in your mouth you’d rather not say, and yet other people are imbeciles with brakes and mouths with no brains. These goblins don’t care for exercise or broccoli, but in a bar three beers are not enough, and then it would be fun to drive along the cliff at break-neck speed as though their lives did not depend on us, as though they were innocent or our mortality, or theirs, if any. Some mean well but tend toward the opposite extreme, denying small pleasures and insisting on beneficial torments. They fret when arrangements are not perfect— unwilling to accept the accidents they attribute to our bumbling. They have plans for us but we often disappoint them. They will never grow up, but expect much more of us, everything except to treat them as we would treat our betters.

Brushes (pointing right)