We find Ambrose Oliver Cuddlepomp at work, or at least what he calls work. It’s not work in the sense of exerting energies for earnings; it’s more like a deliberate marking of time: a way to distinguish one hour and day from another. Ambrose Oliver Cuddlepomp, or “Cuddie” to use the demeaning nickname, has never enjoyed work despite being relatively conscientious when employed. If Cuddlepomp had ever mastered sustained attention, there’s no telling what he might have done. But, lucky for this liquid orb, Cuddlepomp suffers from that most crippling and banal of human failings: laziness. So, instead of an august and imposing Cuddlepomp, we observe a shriveled, opinion-laden old man going about his final days with few regrets.
Cuddlepomp’s lack of regrets sometimes astonishes him. He has comprehensively failed to achieve any of his imagined goals of youth. Yet this doesn’t bother him. Cuddlepomp always saw through himself. Even when imagining those goals, he knew that if achieved, they would not have changed his sense of things or himself. Lack of ambition comes in many forms. In Cuddlepomp’s case, he is blessed with a curious and wonderful lack of envy; he genuinely enjoys the successes of others. Oh, he would like the ease of the wealthy and famous, but he knows it wouldn’t alter his feelings. First class is only more comfortable than coach; it has little impact on one’s philosophy. Young Cuddlepomp often wondered why “envy” was allowed in the seven-deadly-sins club. Sane gods would surely rank murder a greater sin than envy, yet a rich, long literature says otherwise. Envy is the nucleus on which other sins condense. Take it away, and you get Cuddlepomp’s benign lethargy. Yes, Cuddlepomp has read of Achilles’ rage but has never felt it. Even during his divorce, he still wished others well.
Cuddlepomp’s lack of envy and forgiving nature do not imply he is without dreams. Cuddlepomp is a walking dream. Sometimes, he is a literal walking dream. When randomly Wuhan Walking, a habit recently acquired during the last end of the world, he sometimes chides himself for overusing that appalling word “literally” while literally dreaming and walking. It’s a strange habit. Cuddlepomp has one superb talent: daydreaming. The childish Cuddlepomp lived in the basement of his parents’ house. He had a solitary bedroom with blue-painted concrete walls and a gray-shag wall-to-wall carpet. He daydreamed on that shag rug by walking in circles while shaking his fingers and tongue drumming. He walked for so long that he packed down the shag leaving a hard-to-hide dream circle in the rug. Cuddlepomp’s father was annoyed by his shag dream circles, but he was a good father and swallowed his annoyance. Cuddlepomp never stopped dreaming. As he aged, he stopped walking in circles and stared into a blank wall. He needed a blank wall to project the epics in his head. With greater age, Cuddlepomp abandoned wall dreaming and slowly evolved perambulatory musing. Now, Cuddlepomp can be found on his Wuhan Walks, planning his various projects and still dreaming of worlds that will never be. Cuddlepomp has never been embarrassed by his time and life-wasting daydreaming. He rightly regards his habit as less lethal than fentanyl and an ace he can play when thrown into solitary. Locking Cuddlepomp up, even keeping him in the dark, would only facilitate his dreaming. Oddly, Cuddlepomp’s many otherworldly dreams keep him in this world. The day Cuddlepomp stops dreaming will be the day his pointless existence ends.
Yes, Cuddlepomp leads a pointless existence, but he doesn’t take it personally. As far as his limited intellect can ascertain, the entire universe is pointless: just abstractions, currently quantum fields and general relativity, awaiting heat death, the big rip, or collapse back into the sweet singularity from which it spewed. Our universe may be God-free, but we’ll still get a Ragnarök: oblivion without volition or guilt. Perfectly pointless! Cuddlepomp has always known this. Even the grade school Cuddlepomp knew this; it’s the main reason he rejected all religious and spirit-infested beliefs. It’s why he can never repent and beg nonexistent gods to forgive him and not cast him into that nonexistent lake of fire. Cuddlepomp, always seeing through himself, could never sincerely believe, and he would not respect deities dumb enough to fall for his insincerity. Cuddlepomp has supreme being standards.
Cuddlepomp’s human standards are mixed. He admires the demonstrably superior but doesn’t think much of garden-variety naked apes. He likes to think he loathes them, but genuine loathing is work, and Cuddlepomp has never liked work. Still, he’s often annoyed by the incredible ignorance and credulity he observes walking about. Years ago, he read about a pollster asking newly minted Harvard graduates why there are 365 days in a year. It seems many did not know that’s approximately how long it takes the Earth to go around the Sun. How can you get out of grade school without knowing this? Just last week, he marveled at the answers a YouTuber recorded when asking random street people how many stars are in the Milky Way. Many didn’t know the Milky Way is our galaxy, and only one knew the star count was many billions. Again, how can you breathe and not know this? This is why Cuddlepomp limits his exposure to NPR, or whining Karen Radio as he calls it, and stays off X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and other social media sites. He can only absorb limited doses of idiocy before getting aggressively dismissive and sarcastic. In-person, Cuddlepomp is a polite old man who earnestly enjoys conversations with strangers, but online, he’s a monster.
Cuddlepomp’s politics are fluid. He mostly wants the political class dead but lacks the energy and discipline to kill them. He awakes every morning, hoping some asshole somewhere has expired. Observing the demise of political creatures is one of Cuddlepomp’s guilty pleasures. You may wonder how this meshes with Cuddlepomp’s forgiving nature. Is it not hypocritical to enjoy the deaths of the wanting while claiming a forgiving nature? Many would say yes, but Cuddlepomp never claimed he forgives unconditionally. You must repent in Cuddlepomp’s eyes. Do so, and he may forgive. Now, we are repeatedly told not to judge lest we be judged. Only nonexistent gods may judge; silly mortals must abstain. Cuddlepomp called bullshit on this doctrine about the same time he memorized his multiplication tables. The old Cuddlepomp knows humans are social animals and social animals are highly evolved judgment machines. We spend our lives constantly monitoring and updating our view of others. We never stop; it works subconsciously, and it’s been critical to our survival. So, stop the “don’t be judgmental hypocrisy.” Cuddlepomp can put up with any reasoned or imaginative argument, but the one thing Cuddlepomp demands of himself and others is an absolute dedication to detecting and correcting errors. If you cannot admit mistakes, Cuddlepomp will truly loathe you; for this, he will put in the effort.
Strangers see Cuddlepomp as a conventional eccentric: a “mostly harmless,” in Douglas Adam’s immortal words, old man who has somehow retained his teeth. But on the inside, Cuddlepomp has questions. If the storms raging in Cuddlepomp afflict others, this planet is strange. Consider gender. Cuddlepomp was born in an age of males, females, and freaks. In the later decades of Cuddlepomp’s long, pointless existence, the naked apes around him started obsessing about gender. Many made idiotic claims about biological sex that infuriated the scientifically literate Cuddlepomp. Human males have XY chromosomes; human females have XX chromosomes; other rare options like XYY are developmental abnormalities. On this, like Milky Way star counts, the science is settled. Cuddlepomp will allow the notion that “gender” is more general and fluid than biological sex. Languages have male and feminine forms, so linguistic gender is unlike biological sex. A male may claim he is a female, but until technology advances to the point of chromosome substitution, he remains a biological male. That many hysterically deny this while vociferously accusing their critics of being bigoted ignoramuses strikes Cuddlepomp as pathological windmill tilting. This is obdurate idiocy. Only sincere religious and political beliefs are more so. Cuddlepomp remains committed to the conventional view; you need good reasons to change your mind, and none are on offer.
Biological sex is rigorously chromosome-based, but sexual attraction is not. Cuddlepomp learned this later than most. He was a university student on a long bus ride from northern Alberta to Southwestern Montana when he was abruptly accosted in a bus restroom by a prowling homosexual. At first, Cuddlepomp thought he was being mugged and was relieved when the truth dawned. The student Cuddlepomp gathered enough composure to warn off the interloper, who, to his credit, politely disengaged and fled the restroom. Until that moment, Cuddlepomp had never considered non-heterosexual arrangements. As Cuddlepomp analyzed the idea, he found it interesting and sometimes arousing, but Cuddlepomp remained a dedicated heterosexual. He married twice, had children, and never indulged in any affairs, straight or gay. Cuddlepomp’s sexuality is boring; it will never make the news. Cuddlepomp has few regrets, and his sexuality is not on the list.
While Cuddlepomp has few regrets, we must note that “few” is not zero. Cuddlepomp has a loved wife and children. When he is gone, there will be nothing more he can do for them. The adolescent Cuddlepomp sneered at wills, but the old Cuddlepomp admits their utility. His wife will inherit a pittance, and his children will, in the case of her death, be next in line for the remaining crumbs. Whatever comes their way will help, but it won’t resolve their struggles. Only they can do that. We can only help each other; we cannot fix anyone but ourselves.
Cuddlepomp’s major regret is a sad realization that he will never fully understand anything. An old philosophical belief (it can be nothing else) holds that if you fully understand even the tiniest bit of the universe, you will understand it all. How many questions can you ask about a stone ─ its composition, its history, where its elements came from, how it took its shape, whether it’s been thought about by others, its long-term fate, and so forth? Most of these queries will never be answered, but a complete answer to any would exceed our sciences. Cuddlepomp will not live to see these queries resolved, and he suspects that complete answers will be utterly beyond his limited powers anyway. Cuddlepomp has always known this. The young Cuddlepomp would sometimes explode awake with a sudden acute awareness that he would die, vanish, and be no more. It was terrifying. Cuddlepomp calls these awakenings mortal flashes. Mortal flashes decline with age. The old Cuddlepomp, far closer to death than the young, seldom has them. It’s not death that is the problem. Being dead, even for an eternity, will be no different than not being born. Did all those billions of years from the Big Bang bother you? You cannot imagine a universe without yourself because there you are, in the universe, imagining it. Death is mindless, point-of-view-less, alien to our consciousness, and Cuddlepomp suspects alien to all consciousnesses. We’re born ignorant, learn enough to forage and fornicate, and then, like the animals we are, we die, removing our unique ignorance forever. It’s bleak but not personal; the universe cannot be concerned with its contents.
Analyze the Data not the Drivel 