Bathroom Monologue: Might As Well, OR, “Whatever happened once may not have happened at all” –Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This is a tongue twister. To hear John try to perform it either click the triangle on the left to stream audio, or click this text to download the MP3.

Why? You can only speak around your why, for the truth is that whatever happened once tautologically happened once. What has not happened at all may as well not happen. Anything perceived as happening once may happen again (may well have happened innumerable times before you perceived the once). Only that which never happened may well have never happened, but new things emerge all the time. Gadgets, individuals, sayings – things aligned, but things unique. Things that happened. That which has yet never happened might well happen along any minute. Perhaps it will happen five times right in a row, right across the floor. If it doesn’t, then it might as well not. But it may as well. In the vastness of this universe, you cannot demonstrate epistemologically that anything has not happened. Is not happening. Certainly you cannot demonstrate it in the infinite probability bubble universes outside our own, where all probabilities play out. It isn’t just our universe and one where the Third Reich won the war. It’s this one universe, and this universe where I hesitate half a second (for effect), and this universe where I use “that” instead of “this” in one of the places in this sentence, and this universe where I use “that” in another position that is wholly grammatically incorrect. It’s an infinity, and that means everything, and that means whatever happened once has happened every way it ever possibly could somewhere. If it didn’t, then it might as well not have. But if it did, then it might as well have, and that is truth, and truth is meaning, and if you oppose that meaning then you oppose truth, and the opposition of truth is wrong.

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