“I’m reminded of Orville Tethington, inventor of the world’s first steam-powered fog machine. He’s also the guy who, after the Germans invented the flame thrower in WWI, decided to counteract it with his own creation, the candle thrower. The candle thrower was only battle tested once, and after fifteen minutes the war zone was littered with lit candles. Upon returning home after the war, some of the soldiers suffered such extreme and bizarre cases of PTSD that anytime a civilian lit a match or used their lighter, the soldiers would hit the ground and start singing “Happy Birthday.”

“Did you ever think about the creation of the flame-thrower? Someone, somewhere, at some time must have been sitting on his porch, and said, thoughtfully, 'I want to set him on fire.' gesturing to his neighbor. His friend who sat beside him and happened to be handy with tools said, 'I can do that.' Thus, we have a flame thrower.”

“Where does the flame of a candle go after is faded?”

“There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?”

“In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a single thing more. Do you understand this? So I am saying to you that after a battle each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and that when a was is ended it is as if there have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers.”

“Instead of selling other countries weapons, we should sell them candles. Maybe then instead of singing the praises of war, they’d start singing Happy Birthday. And I don’t know anybody, not even my bully of an uncle, Uncle Sam, who wants to start a fight during that song.”