Thanks, everyone, thank you for listening in.

I’m always a little dubious about the easy truisms that many people toss around, in fact that almost everyone nods their head at when they hear them. They’re often clichés, too, and so the fact that they’re hackneyed old worn-out sayings, I find that kind of tasteless too. Like, you hear someone after they’ve gone through something shitty in their lives, and they come up with Well, everything happens for a reason in order to make themselves feel better, or to reassure themselves that God has their back, or the universe as a whole, all 520 sextillion objects in it, are looking down on you with a plan in place.

And just let me add a side note about that number. 520 sextillion: that is all the stars, planets, black holes, and galaxies. It’s one of those numbers that it’s kind of hard to picture or imagine, like if you were trying to assign an incompetency rating to the Trump administration. It helps me if I kind of break it in half: it’s about 720 billion multiplied by 720 billion.

I’m not sure if this has helped you though.

Anyway, I was talking about truisms, and the one I really wanted to focus on is that prostitution is the oldest profession. I might concede that it’s like in the top ten, maybe, but the oldest profession? I’m imagining a bunch of wanderers in the waste land after a war, like refugees or something, or people in a small town who go off course after they go in search of Fresca because they don’t carry it any more at the local convenience store.

Finally they arrive at an expanse of land where they figure they can start their new lives. It’s arable, so that they could grow crops. It’s surrounded by forest. It even has a supply of clean drinking water conveniently on the edge, and some abandoned buildings left by others who have obviously lived here before. So a few of the townspeople get together to plan things, nothing formal, just a group of people throwing around ideas of what needs to be done next, and particularly what needs to be done first.

Hank at the back of room say, “Well, we’re going to need some prostitutes.”

There’s a silence. Everyone remains in their seat but makes about a quarter turn to stare him down. Finally, Ethel speaks up.

“Hank, for fuck sake, what are you talking about?”

“Well,” Hank says, as casual as anything, “that’s the oldest job in the world and so by logic that’s the first kind of workers we’ll need.”

There’s a hush first and then pockets of chattering start up in various corners.

Hank continues. “Listen, just look at the situation we’re in right now at this very moment. We’ve been on the road for what, a month and a half, and I haven’t had so much as a blowjob the whole time. I’ll come out and admit it that I’ve had to pleasure myself after everyone else fell asleep. Like, every second night.”

The women understandably go a little nuts when they hear this. It’s not Ethel this time, but Susan, and she’s pissed.

“Listen, asshole, you’re right about the time on the road. I think it’s been a good two months at least. That guy who refused to bathe was mauled and eaten by a bear. That was hard to see, though a relief to the nostrils. And then the Patterson twins leaned over the edge of that ravine a little too far, and they were lost, and one of them got caught on that branch on the way down, and it was when he struggled to get free, that it broke and then he followed his brother about ten seconds later. Anyway, I’m getting off the point. We don’t need whores. We need people to, I don’t know, people to build more buildings, and somewhere to put our poop, and people who know how to farm to start growing some goddamn vegetables.”

Hank is unconvinced. “I want the whores,” he says, “first thing, or I’m going to burn down anything that anyone else gets started.”

And so the townspeople trampled Hank to death and got down to some rudimentary city planning.

But I know what the saying is getting at, the oldest profession and all that. It means that after you have a town and most of the people are going to work and people start to get married and all of that, eventually someone’s wife is going to refuse to do something or other in the bedroom, and there you go, a profession is born.

It’s Sally this time. “Sure, honey, I can do that. Cost you two hundred, and two fifty if you want bareback.”

And that’s my time. Thanks for listening and I hope to see you here again next week.