Why are we here? The answer, as anyone on this scrapheap of a ship can tell you, is a lemon. This major philosophical question that had never been answered satisfactorily by theologians nor any religion found on a small and mostly harmless blue planet, has in a recent past been unsatisfactorily answered at the first encounter with an alien species in deep space. The answer upset an entire population to such an extent that it was on the verge of wiping itself out of existence only after they realised it could not wipe out the alien species that had burdened them with this utterly disappointing truth.
Who would have thought then that the guild of philosophers, mostly employed as baristas or found flipping burgers at all sorts of non-philosophical establishments fronting a huge yellow M, would save humankind from extinction? Not I. They came to the aid of the nation by reinterpreting the alien-given answer and purporting new meaning to it. With it came a new purpose for life, and – to be brutally honest – a new form of religion without a God or higher power.
True to the very nature of philosophers and their philosophical ways, this interpretation of the meaning of life was a twaddle packed into three hefty volumes of unintelligible and incomprehensible language that has never been truly understood by anyone but those who brought it forth. When the world finds out on a large scale that the wool has been pulled over their eyes and humans start grasping the actual contents of those works of bosh, they might become a smidgen vexed. Until then, the saviours are celebrated, praised, and decorated on one dubious national holiday a year.
So, to them, the deep thinkers of the year of our great first world leader, Siobhan O’Rion, we owe National Lemon Day. Which, coincidentally, is today. “This fabulous day was installed in honour of those men and women who philosophised their ways through this pickle and the hardships that came with it,” so it is written. It is to those who sacrificed their valuable spare time voluntarily to save the highly ungrateful, that today, Orion’s Date 152608.06 we have lemons for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And as we, the humble crew, were gathered this early morning in the canteen on Claudius One high above the Earth, taking a big ol’ bite together from a juicy, sour lemon, we gave grace to them, the heroes and heroines we did not deserve but received anyway. Here’s to philosophers all over the globe and beyond. By Claud, how we hate them.
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