Casablanca

Casablanca
A man with a crooked tie and a straight face sagged with boredom as he explained on my tv how black holes devour whole galaxies. This is a no big deal value meal for the black hole. After lunch, the man with the crooked tie and the straight face, in an effort to put all this into couch potato language, states in dour tones, "Basically, the stuffed black hole burps and a exceedingly fine and worthy atom escapes into the vast nothingness."
Escapes? Escapes how? Did the atom bribe a galaxy guard? Was there a miniature cake with a baked in file? And don't you think that when a galaxy vanishes there should at least be a moment of silence instead of a PBS plea for support. Maybe even some law enforcement. At that point, a gendarme with a wry smile eating a rye sandwich announces, "Round up the usual suspects."
The man with a crooked tie and a straight face continued in his monotone voice, "In about ten to the hundredth years, the black hole will have swallowed itself to death and be no more."
I always thought my Uncle Tony, he with the dandruff that smelled like garlic powder, was the most ferocious eating force in the universe and I remember that he took Alka-Seltzer tablets. Maybe the answer is to make the world's biggest Alka-Seltzer tablet and fly it right into the mouth of the black hole. Maybe that would save the universe. To think my Uncle Tony could save the universe when he couldn't save left-overs. And this makes me think of the human condition. Princes and paupers, dictators and those taking dictation all get swallowed except maybe tonight's radio guest-- our co host Ali. Two eye operations, Two rods placed in her back allowing her to stand straight. Operations on her feet because she was walking on her ankle bones which is hell on shoes and souls-a little vision left in one eye. No one believed she would walk down the graduation aisle with her parents joining all the other crying parents, but she did. Surely a just God witnessing the assembled indignities that made up her ninety pound body would spare her the final indignity of being swallowed into nothingness by a black hole. Maybe she would be the exceedingly fine and worthy atom, made whole by the Light of God, that escapes and is free at last.