(previous) part of our Tales of the WLBOTT series (next)
Lochlan came home from his shift at the nursing home one evening, and Lyra had her college notebooks and a textbook spread out on her plywood desk.
“Remember when we took an intro to philosophy class at OC?” Lyra asked.
This was a bit of a sore subject. Lyra got an A, Lochlan got a B-. His downfall was the midterm. The assigned topic was deontology, but he wrote his paper on dendrology. Lyra wrote about moral duty; Lochlan wrote about trees, with particular emphasis on using tree rings to reconstruct the past.
“Trees have moral responsibility!” shouted Lochlan.
“What are you talking about?”
“They hold the soil together. They take carbon dioxide out of the air. And wood. Wood! And the professor said he liked my research.” Lochlan was still a bit defensive.
Lyra laughed. “No, no. I wanted a starting point for Tier 3. What’s the right thing to do, where do we go to next….”
“Yeah, okay,” said Lochlan, a bit placated. “What have you found out?”
“Well, the first thing we have to ask ourselves is, ‘does anything matter?'” said Lyra, in a slightly didactic tone .
Lochlan scoffed. “Lyra, how can you even ask that? Wink’s first playoff game is Thursday. Of course things matter! You’re going to jinx everything.”
“Okay, stuff matters. But we’ve got a lot to get through: nihilism, atheism, agnosticism, theism (lots of flavors there). Then hedonism, egoism, Epicureanism… We’re going to skip Ayn Rand – she creeps me out. Then we get into the good stuff – get it –good stuff. Utilitarianism, consequentialism, moral duty, virtue ethics, and your favorite – deontology. Oh, and I came across something interesting – effective altruism. I don’t know much about it, but it sounds like you can use spreadsheets to plot your moral destiny.”
“Lyra, are these all different answers to the same question?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then why are we studying all of them?”
“Because I haven’t figured out which questions we’re supposed to ask.”
“Lots of ideas. But maybe we could set a bottom line,” continued Lyra, “before we get too deep into this. We both want to do the right thing, right? We don’t want to end up in a soulless mansion surrounded by useless crap.”
Lochlan nodded his agreement. He also hoped Lyra wasn’t going to drag him into the research – it sounded like a lot of brain work, and he knew she’d come up with the right answer eventually.
The next day, Lochlan came home to Casa de los Sueños Torcidos to find a very upset Lyra.
“What’s the matter, Sis?”
“Oh, Brother, we’ve got a big problem. Remember when we sold our stock, thinking we were at the top of the bubble? Well, we were, and if we’d waited we would have lost maybe a third of our money. So we sold our stock, and Fidelity and Vanguard put the proceeds into money market accounts. Cool, right? It’s like having a safe savings account.”
Lochlan was kind-a-sort-a following. “Yeah, cool, right?”
“Yeah, cool,” said Lyra, “except for this.” She held up two letters from the IRS – one addressed to her, the other to Lochlan.
“You opened my mail?” asked Lochlan.
“Not the point. We sold the stock, and now we got a letter from the IRS. Just to clarify, they did not use Love stamps on the envelope.”
The bottom line: they owed capital gains taxes on their stock sales. The IRS was not being patient until April 15; they wanted a big quarterly payment now.
“They want $9.4 million from me, and $1.6 million from you,” said Lyra.
Lochlan looked over Lyra’s letter. “Why are these letters so tattered? What happened?”
Lyra looked chastened. “My desk is a little messy. And they’ve been sitting here for a month.”
Lochlan was growing angry. “I can’t imagine a worse way to use this money than giving it to the federal government. Eleven million dollars. That’s like six golfing weekends for that clown in the White House.”
“Let me work on it,” said Lyra. They both hated the clown with a passion. They held him personally responsible for the death of their parents and their baby sister. But that’s another story for another time.
NVIDIA Again
When Lochlan came home from work the following day, Lyra’s first words were, “You guys are idiots.”
“Conceded,” said Lochlan, with a tone of resignation. No way he was going to defend his gender. But then his curiosity kicked in. “What did we do now?”
Lyra had her laptop open to The Guardian. “Remember the NVIDIA stock I sold? Just in time, it turns out. The guy that runs the company, who has been married for forty years, just got outed for having an affair with a Chinese spy.”
Then Lyra looked doubtful. “Lochlan, I think this article is fake.”
“What?”
“I just double-checked. It’s not The Guardian. It’s The Guardian Armadillo.”
“Well, the pictures look real.”
They adjourned to their respective laptops on their respective plywood desks. While Lyra was researching the national security implications of transferring the most sensitive technology to communist China, Lochlan was searching for pictures of Alice Huang.
“Wow, she’s hot!” exclaimed Lochlan. Lyra shook her head.
Lochlan continued his research. “Hey, Jensen Huang didn’t have a prenup. His wife will clear $80 billion. That should ease Lori’s pain.”
After a few minutes they lost their enthusiasm over the story. Boneheads, the both of them, they thought.
Lyra had turned to page 120 of The Ultimate SPAM® Cookbook, and made a tricky recipe: SPAM® Benedict with Kimchi and BimBim Hollandaise.
Our love of SPAM® Classic and everything Korean led us to crweate a loving tribute to the cultural mash-up that is quintessentially American with a dish that America loves – Eggs Benedict.
– The Ultimate SPAM® Cookbook
Lyra used store-bought kimchi for the dinner. It was served as a side dish, and she was telling Lochlan that she wanted to make her own. She’d been reading about it online, and it sounded like a fun culinary adventure. She liked the idea of burying it in an earthen jar for a month in January. This all occurred before they actually tasted the kimchi. With their first bite, they realized that kimchi was orthogonal to their West Texas taste buds. “Maybe it’s an acquired taste,” suggested Lochlan. To their credit, they both finished their servings of kimchi, and Lochlan had an extra scoop.
After dinner, with the dishes done and the leftovers put away, Lochlan gave Lyra a little present, inspired by the letters from the IRS. It was a 1,000-piece Love Stamp puzzle. They started working on it right away. The regular rectangles of the stamps helped them make some good progress.
After the puzzle started to take shape, Lyra noticed something odd. “What’s with these WLBOTT stamps? Is that part of the government? A special postal service?”
They couldn’t quite put their finger on it, but for some reason it made them remember buying all that okra at the Central Texas farmers’ market.