Ode to the Debunker

Tonight the city is packed like a cheap suitcase, my friends. It is brimming over with miserable, sweaty recluses, who sit naked in their stench-ridden plaster of Paris hovels like the penthouses of the damned. They spend their unfortunate lives brewing up Byzantine conspiracy theories like pots of runny black coffee, in an ass-clenching attempt to pass those painful small hours of the night's midsection, hours that cling and drag like a moss-covered gallstone. And not just tonight, no. Last night, as well. Most likely last Tuesday. Maybe other nights, it's hard to say.

True enough, there are still some intrepid dreamers who sniff glue or make Popsicle stick models of Eartha Kitt's gigantic ass when the boredom horn comes calling, cutting a crimson swath through their sleepwalking nightmare lives. But countless others have no hobbies at all, and instead attempt to break boredom's dark stranglehold by dreaming up improbable conspiracies galore, spiraling out into infinity with their paranoid cake-baking.

But the twisting corridors of this sickly web don't end there, good friend. This lonely waltz demands several more dancers to move their hips in and out when the suggestion is made, like freak-dancing mulatto robots. This latter-day ecosystem of conspiracy is made complete only by the existence of the noble dubunker, the conspiracy theorist's natural predator! Without debunkers, the conspiracy theorist population would grow wildly out of control, regenerating exponentially and savaging the natural cultural landscape. It would choke out all other indigenous lifetypes, like bad drivers and hypochondriacs. The beautiful diversity of nature would quickly and unceremoniously be destroyed, like a bedwetting puppy that was a gift from your ex-wife.

You might argue that this could be a good thing, especially the next time some sex-crazed zealot of questionable lineage backs his 4-Runner over the top of your humble sparkbox of a car, pausing only to spew a smoking stream of white-hot vitriol out his driver-side window before he peels out, and his bumper sticker tells you to go hump a penguin. But diversity is sustainability my friend, and without every variety of unfortunate asshole out there in the world, the whole circus tent would come down like a giant scale model of the Notre Dame cathedral, one made of lubricated dominoes.

Pluck one sphincter-searing malcontent from the beautiful mosaic of life and when your back is turned, six other varieties of life would disappear in the bat of a bat's eye. The nursemaid, the wax statue enthusiast, or the twice-baked grandmother, perhaps? Or could it be the surgeon, the Harley mechanic or the last unmolested boyscout? That's just the thing, my friends, the choice is not ours to make, and when we start yanking fibrous polybendanium stalks willy-nilly from the high-tech camping tent of nature, no one can say just what will come falling down around our ears next.

And what is life without the ammonia-scented wonders of nature? The dizzying variety of crawling, backward-twitching creation, a rancid, festering cornucopia of tropical ooze clogging our eye sockets like a pudding-thick discharge? Not a whole flaming lot. It's a couple of stale Styrofoam coffee cups rolling around on the floorboards of a cobalt blue 1985 Chevy Nova, friend, and personally I'm one who has been down that road before. You can have it. It only goes to Wisconsin.

So before you go to bed tonight, say a humble prayer of thanks to the noble debunker, for all too often they go unrecognized and unthanked. Yet regardless, they bravely trod forward, never once complaining. And when life leaves a steaming batch of road apples on their path, they make delicious apple pie.

And I think we can all learn a valuable lesson from that.

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