Beware the hungry whirlpools my friends, the dark undertow of collective vortices that would love to undertake you into their burgeoning carnivals of lost souls. The hungry whirlpools are slippery concavities dotting the thin ice of modern life. They might take the form of some tiny substance, a bit of white powder, a pill that makes you smaller, some little thing that crosses the blood-brain barrier and thereby seizes power. Every hungry whirlpool has a little black hole at its center, an object of unprofitable obsession, the neon spectacle, the fleshy, ever-receding corridors of online pornography, the glittering purchase drawing you into the sticky depths of credit card debt, the infatuation that confuses the hottie with the godhead, the poison Tea Party of political ideology, the glib success formula, the get-rich-quick scheme, the craving for celebrity, the food-like substance that melts in your mouth and spikes your blood sugar, the clueless delusion that sex can be casual, the moments that slip by to make up a dull day, the vapid allure of status updates and text messages about nothing, the channel surfing upon oceans of trash, the fingers twitching on game consoles with hot pockets rotting in the gut, the small talking, hanging about and petty status seeking of the social matrix, the thousand-thousand ways of falling through the wrong end of the telescope so that your life becomes like a prolonged and monotonous colonoscopy along the dark edges of emptiness. Beware such hungry whirlpools my friends! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the frumious bandersnatching of hungry ghosts that can never be filled up! The more you give them, the more they want to suck you dry! Beware the hungry whirlpools my friends! They only want to pull you into their black holes, the super dense emptiness decanted from the souls that have collapsed into their hungry cores. Never, never, never surrender to such hungry whirlpools my friends! Their dark suction may tug at your feet. Their greedy tendrils may wrap you in their false embrace. Disavow them, disallow them! Keep moving past them! Keep moving toward the experience of meaning! Keep engaging with life. Find true nourishment and nourish others. And never, never, never surrender to the hungry whirlpools — for they are where withering souls go to creep, and you have promises to keep, and miles to go before you sleep…