Whither Enlightenment?

The Most Unenlightened Person On Earth was enjoying a half-pint of ice cream while having a good portion of his life's happy memories erased by watching a crappy sitcom on cable television. Of course, he had seen this same episode several times before, so he was, in a sense, writing over the happy memories of seeing the episode the third time, but, since he never memorized anything unless he absolutely had to - telephone numbers, that Wordsworth poem in tenth grade, all the lyrics to Jay-Z's "99 Problems" - that particular section of his brain, softened & spongy from disuse, carelessly slopped the new short-term memories over other saved memories, rather than putting them in a neural processing queue, as the standard cranial model tends to do.

Halfway through the sitcom, the Most Unenlightened Person On Earth began experiencing gastric discomfort because he had eaten, for the last two weeks, at nothing but American fast food joints. Due to their unregulated status, the "restaurants," as they were misleadingly known, regularly served their patrons at rather low cost food that was as close to being spoiled, rotted, rancid, unwashed, inedible as legally possible, if the laws about the food were enforced, which of course they weren't. The Most Unenlightened Person On Earth was however used to food poisoning & also used to spending long hours on the toilet, where he passed his time & the indigestible portions of his most recent meal (an astonishing percentage of it) reading magazines with pictures of scantily-clad women in them & old Stephen King books he had enjoyed when he was younger.

He hadn't visited a doctor, outside of an emergency room visit last summer, in many years. He did not know that he had a significant E. Coli infection, that his brain harbored something similar to the mad cow virus, that he had Type II Diabetes, & that his heart was beating irregularly due to his growing weight. He drank some antacid to settle his stomach, smoked a joint, ate some popcorn & a baloney sandwich, & fell asleep masturbating to a commercial for a video series in which obviously sleazy men ask obviously inebriated women to show the camera their breasts.

The next morning, the Most Unenlightened Person On Earth woke after a more-than-microscopically small black hole had passed through the center of the earth, &, on its way back into space, at an unthinkable speed & smallness, had ever-so-slightly travelled the length of his body & broke down its cellular structure along the way. He gasped his last gasp as the sunlight seeped in through shuttered windows, & the last thing the Most Unenlightened Person On Earth saw was blood behind his eyes & a night's worth of indulgence littering his coffee table.

& he was not Enlightened.