Socratic Dialogue

A Lecture Prepared by Prof. Harvey "M." Stwartkeimer

Socrates, the ancient wonder, a thinker, a tailor. It is known the tales of this great man were the direct result of his thoughts.

Socrates the man was well liked by his fellow Romans and was invited to all of the best parties in the ancient Roman city of Rohm, where all of the good citizens would take baths together and watch each other where they could not watch themselves.

Socrates had a very good friend named Al-Sa Beateeze. Al-Sa was an active participant in and outspoken advocate of a lifestyle of uninhibited hedonism. Al-Sa once wrote of his very good friend Soc,

Old Soc is a great guy man. Wow! Y'know what I mean ey? He could go to a party and drink a couple of 40 ounce bottles of liquor, a couple of two-fours of beer and he would not even get drunk. (his favorite brand was Pompeyberg, the good Old beer of Naples.)

He usually preferred drinking large mugs of hash oil and concentrated LSD. This would get him a little high causing him to get the munchies. Then he would order a couple of large peyote pizzas with double mushrooms (shrewms mon!) and a side order of anchovies.

Then, carrying his brief case he would venture out into cold winter nights wearing only his bathing trunks to contemplate the universe.

Socrates was no cad. Surely he would have been first to invent the Dick test had his parents given him a different name.

This man was truly a phenomenon, a historical landmark, and a lunar courier de lun. He was never arrested, fined or deported until he was sentenced to die for corrupting the minds of a couple of Harvard psychology professors.

For this crime he was sentenced to inject a large aliquot of Pine-Sol into his veins after which he began hallucinating and mumbling about the serious health effects of second-hand smoke. A week later he died, but he died a happy and serene man.

His brightest, most intelligent, highest IQ student, Potato, wrote down an account of his last moments.

Potato: A single candle shed it's humble radiance into the cube-like object we called a "room." My old and wise teacher lay atop the soft and comfortable rectangular object we called a "bed." He looked at me through two openings adjacent to his nose and begged me not to be forlorn. How could I be forlorn at the sight of a man whose visual information came to him through his nostrils? Am I wrong?

I asked my kind master how he exhibit such glee in the face of his imminent demise. He chided me for asking such stupid questions as he took a long haul from the Marlboro dangling from his mouth. I insisted however that I was quite serious and proceeded, avec tact, to press my inquiry.

He then looked at me with resigned eyes and said, "I am happy because I have a terrible stomach ache." I tried to conceal my confusion over this cryptic reply by stepping away from his line of sight but I was too slow to avoid his keen vision.

He laughed and laughed. Then he started to cough. I sensed the approaching decease of my companion and began uncontrollably bellowing and shedding tears, know as crying.

In a voice growing progressively weaker and as he gripped my fore-arm for some shred of empathetic energy he began speaking, "My student, I shall soon be gone. Who knows, maybe I shall go somewhere far, far away. Perhaps there exists some Eldora do, some Nirvana some... cough... cough... hack... hack.... cough... cough... hack... cough... belch... hack.... paradise lost or maybe some.... coughing etc. highly industrialized technological civilization... one to which we normally are denied access, but one to which, through some mysterious transition, we are carried after death.

He took another drag off his Marlboro. I lit one of my own and took a deep drag. “Taste never quits, “ I thought.

In this Shangri-La of existence one would have the use of toothpaste and deodorant. There would also be an ample supply of toilet paper. People could now dry themselves off when they got out of the toilet.

Who, my dear Potato, can say with certainty that such a place does not exist? Can you? Hell no. You are but a common vegetable lacking the complex neurological system necessary for the performance of speech. You cannot say!"

At this point I began to feel insulted by the good man's contemptible remarks about my neurological system. I felt like asking whom the hell he thought was writing all this down, a vegetable? A potato?

But I knew better. I knew that he would respond to the challenge by reminding me that as a semi-spherical object I lacked even the physical attributes necessary for the act of writing. This thought sparked off another inquiry deep within the core of my existence. How indeed was it possible that I was writing this all down?

It occurred to me years later that due to the dual nature of the universe I was a paradox. There were, in fact, two me. One was a potato in matter, a man in form. The other was the opposite of the first.

I chose not to reveal this mental dilemma to my pedagogue for fear that the added drain of mental energy from his great mind would expedite his passing.

He then ordered me back to where I had previously stood vertically. He said that by the expression on my skin he could tell I was doing something that approximated thought.

"That's another insult," I thought approximately.

I watched as the smoke drifted from the end of my Marlie. It was soothing.

"Listen my good student," he said, "listen while I still possess words. You may not know it yet. You may not know it for many years, alas, you may not know until you too find yourself on your death-bed, but one day you will know that upon this day in the year of our lod, in the name of his excellence the emperor of Playboy magazine and in our mutual love of intellectual integrity, you.... YOU... have learned a great lesson.

Suddenly he exhaled deeply. Then, equally as fast he inhaled in a manner that was almost exactly equal and opposite of the manner in which he had exhaled in the first place. Would this ne his last cigarette? His eyes shut suddenly and he stopped breeding.

"Oh, no!" I thought, "This is it!"

Then I noticed a subtle smirk on his face.

"Oh, no!" I thought, "it isn't."

Then he started laughing, "Ha, ha, fooled you didn't I. Ha, ha!"

I was elated to some extent by this recent development. On the other hand I wanted to go to a drug party at the coliseum that evening and time was now running short. I think he may have been jealous that I was going and decided to postpone his cancellation just to spite me.

"You asshole!" I kidded, not really kidding. "You god damned anachronism."

"You son of a bitch," he chided, tongue in cheek.

"You disgusting pervert!" I said laughing.

"How dare you call me a pervert you sniveling aggregate of rotting starch!" he joked.

"Oh yeah? Well anyone who would play dead when he's in your shape has a few shoes missing from the old shelf," I glibly replied.

"I hear your mother had plenty of company in the sack!" He was hitting below the belt now.

"Shows how much you know," I said, "She came in a basket."

Then the two of us burst into jovial laughter. We laughed and laughed and laughed until we almost cried. Then he coughed twice and died.

I was devastated. I could feel myself getting extremely warm and my thoughts started to take on a French accent. Poulet? Vive la Quebec? Quel heur et tille?

Potato glanced up at the sundial on the wall and noticed the party at the coliseum was starting in five minutes. There was no time left to mourn this lump of shit laying prostate in front of him.

He quickly hailed a cab and arrived at the drug party minutes later.

That night, he got really fried.

last modified:Wednesday,March 19, 2008 at 04:40