ALL ABOUT NOTHING.

            The other day I was reading a news article about the Pakistani polygamist who has already fathered 35 children and he wants to add wife number four to his first three wives so he can ultimately father 100 children! ONE HUNDRED CHILDREN!! This information had me pretty revved up as a tie-in to a Father’s Day themed column for the paper…and then I looked at the calendar and I saw that Father’s Day isn’t this coming weekend it’s next weekend, the 19th! What the deuce? In my haste to jump all over the selfish, irresponsible motives of this man I must have lost my head for a minute or two there.

            The thing is, these column themes don’t just drop out of the sky or anything. Well, sort of, if you know what I mean, but not normally in the literal sense, although I won’t rule out that ever happening. I actually have to think and stuff to come up with some kind of an idea of what to write about every week and, I’m not sure how it is with other writers, but once I hit on a topic…That’s it! Eureka! I have a theme! My mind is now closed! I don’t even keep another theme on deck, let alone in the hole, so when I’m out of subjects…yikes…it’s scramble, scramble, scramble.

            Oh, by the way, I must say that, again, I am unsure of how other writers conduct their business but I am a last minute kind of guy. “When’s it due? Tomorrow, eh? Hmmm…I better get to work on that I guess.”

            So out with the Father’s Day topic, for this week anyway, and on to what? Hmmmm? I don’t know… how about…nothing. Because that’s what I’ve got…nothing…and all the experts tell you to write about what you know and I know nothing. If I know anything…it’s nothing.

            “See that over there? You know what that is? It’s nothing?”

            “C’mere, guess what’s in my hand…you’re right…nothing.”

            “Mumble, mumble, grumble, grumble…”

“What’s that Dear? What’d you say?”

“Nothing, honey.”

            You know how it is when you reach into your pocket for the stuff you know is in there and then you inside-out your pocket and what do you find?? NOTHING! So nothing is really something even if you call it nothing. It has to be something. So when I choose to write about nothing I am really writing about something then, aren’t I?

            I recall the time that the nose, throat and ear doctor sent me for an MRI on my head to see why my hearing was deteriorating in a weird, weird way and…guess what they found…you guessed it…NOTHING. Now my pockets AND my head have a whole lot of nothing.

            You don’t’ have to rely on me alone to fill you in on nothing. It seems like philosophers have been discussing nothing since the 5^th Century BC. Good ol’ Parmenides was one of the earliest western philosophers to consider nothing as a concept. And you thought I knew nothing.

            If you really want definitive proof that nothing is something then you can Wikipedia it and read the 2700, or so, words on the subject. Nothing can take up an awful lot of your time, too, I’m finding out.

            Well, that’s all I’ve got for this week. I hope you got something out of nothing. I was so happy to do it for you, and besides… you know…it was nothing.

“Anything can happen in life, especially nothing,”-Michel Houellebecq (1956- ).