Vice

"Choosing your virtue is easy ... you may select whatever is most suitable to your palette and you get points for 'doing your best.'

Your vice, though ... that's something to be cherished. It's rarely rewarded in any fathomable way, and yet we all have them. We all exercise them daily. We all make horrible, exquisite, ultimately damning use of them so that we may live day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute. But they are, indeed, damnable. Obscene. Best left alone. My god, could you imagine life without the vices that keep you from killing yourself? What horrors we may yet witness in the name of virtue, integrity, and unutilized vice.

For it is what we must not do- but do anyway- that in many ways defines who we are and how we are remembered. A good man is remembered by his family and may enjoy the honor of his house for all ages ... but the troubled man, anguished man, dangerous man, that is who we are. The man who will wrong others and be wronged. The man who will condemn others and be condemned. The man who will go to the grave with not just friends but half a society's worth of enemies. All of us, living in vice, damning ourselves and the day we were born with each swig of the bottle, thrust of pure lust, drag of some obnoxious chemical.

So I say, to all who will hear ... choose your vice with care. Choose your weakness such that you may live to the heights of damnation and the depths of immortal praise. Be who you are and do what gives you happiness from breath to breath ... for although I do not celebrate or endorse hedonism, I do say that its appeal and use, in ironic moderation, is what makes this existence in any way comprehensible. Remember- any hero may choose his strength ... but the wisest man knows that he spends far more time with his flaws."