Dear Todd,

Please stop pranking my dad. He thinks the walkie-talkie you hid in his room is the voice of God. You know how religious he is. I admit, it was funny when you told him to buy Whiteclaws for Kathy’s party because ‘God was feeling thirsty.’ But this has gotten out of hand.

It is the goal and intention of this project to gain a better understanding of postmodern bachelorism through application-based research and documentation.

Members of the Faith Inspired Cloning Group, (FICG) have long been vexed by the persistent popular belief that Lincoln and Darwin were humanists. FICG leadership is confident that young Lincoln and Darwin clones raised in a sequestered faith-based community will climb to even greater heights than the originals and repudiate their irreligious views. To wit, Lincoln was likely a deist and the adult Darwin gave up Christianity. But for all the care and research FICG has thus far expended on its corrective cloning project, the teenaged versions of Lincoln and Darwin disappoint.

Store-bought? Blasphemy. The wheat, I harvested it, in the old ways, scythe razor sharp and back firm. The cheese, from cows I first midwifed and nurtured, and once grown, gently milked, and the milk I curdled in my own hands. These tortellini I was first to name, for before me they crossed our lips as spaghetti, or still prior, as sketty, all noodles of the pasta variety subsumed thusly.

Picture a factory. No, not like that. Like a mega metronome fueled by space and time. Billowing smokestacks ascend into the ethers, releasing sonorous aphorisms born of byzantine soothsayers. Turning cogs crank such a hyper neo sea change that your atmosphere reverts to primordial Babylon. There, can you see it now? This is the C+C Music Factory.