Stuck in the Middle with You

I tried to explain to Charon all the good that Prometheus had done for humankind. But he really couldn’t do anything about it, being simply a boatman. When I finally got across the river and met my titanic progenitor, he was doing the limbo with some other patriarchal soul brothers. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by the apathetic attitudes here on the doorstep of Hell, but the way they wagered who could bend beneath the lowest bar bespoke an indifference that was new to me. The calypso music was OK, and the bar was always open. High or low all the same. It seemed the champion of humankind was ambivalent about his gift. The arts of civilization were small potatoes from what he could see. The end was in the beginning. We really had nowhere to go, no matter how hard we tried to get ahead. “You know,” he said to me, with an interminable sadness in his ethereal voice, “how, when things look bad, it seems they’ll never get any better? It lasts forever.”