The answer is 42

...but what is the question? A dispatch from bewilderness

Once upon a time, a man named Arthur and his best friend, Ford, were ejected into space when their planet exploded. Their planet was Earth.

But fortunately, a spaceship called the Heart of Gold, which carried something called an Infinite Improbability Drive, picked them up 29 seconds later. That does seem improbable.

So Ford and Arthur headed to Magrathea, a planet which made custom planets for rich people, who were, of course, called the cosmic 1%.

Meanwhile aboard the ship, things seemed pretty strange. For example, Ford turned into a penguin, Arthur lost a few limbs, and a whale fell out of the sky.

The whale felt confused and excited by the wind running through his/her/its hair. I didn’t know whales had hair. Sometimes I feel confused, too. Though way older than the girl in the pic below.

Paint and collage by Judith Hannah Weiss

Just at that moment, Deep Thought, the world’s largest computer, produced the answer to life, the universe, and everything else. The answer was: 42. But almost at once (!), there was another problem.

The problem was no one knew the question.

Just that 42 was the answer.

So Deep Thought had to come up with the question.

But that would take ten million years.

This is a very highly adapted, extremely concentrated, brain damaged version of a book I read by Douglas Adams, who was a word master, as evidenced by lines like this: “The ships hung in the sky in much the way that bricks don’t.”

 “Ford Galaxy” was the name of my first car, when I lived on another planet, or might as well have, in another century. It had tail fins and was a beautiful bronze-like color and belonged to my father.

Four decades later, I was hit by a drunk with a truck, and invented an Imaginary Therapist, and relearned how to read, though not very well. Stories diverged, as fluid as finches, or were cut off, at a moment of high drama, like an old projector snapping the celluloid smack in the middle of a big scene.

The Imaginary Therapist asked if this happened often, and I said, “Never. Rarely. Sometimes. Always.”

This morning, I checked the news. Everything seemed to be falling apart, though not by design, except for your iPhone, which is falling apart by design, so you’ll buy the next one. I don’t have an iPhone.  I have a Galaxy phone.  No, really, I do.