Life Is A Fallacy

         Lacey was a benevolent child. At the age of fourteen, she hopped and skipped wherever she went. Her pigtails tied up in pink ribbons, her slippers, seeing how it was summer, had yellow bottoms with a large blue flower on the strap, and her eyes had a brilliant sparkle to them that let anyone who saw her know that she was a friend. After school, and marching band practice, Lacey would walk around town for an hour or two, just to see if anyone needed help, then rush home to do her studies. She made sure to do all her homework, be kind in school and get good reports all around.
         On this particular day Lacey found herself wandering throughout the town park. She had just fetched a bag of bird seeds for two elderly women when she noticed a boy. He was clad in all black, as was becoming common among many teens, sitting on the ground, under a tree and next to a bench near the corner of the park. On the bench some moss was growing and a spider had found a place to put her web. Lacey recognized this guy, seeing as he sat right next to her in biology. That’s… oh what was his name, she pondered. Danny! That’s right!
         “Are you ok?” Lacey inquired of the gloomy teenager. He only barely glanced his eyes up to her before replying with utter silence. “You’re Danny right?”
         At that, Lacey achieved the frigid response, “My name is Vladimir.” Lacey could have sworn that, as he said his name, thunder broke in the air and the sky darkened some.
         “And I,” a small voice began from behind the bench, “am the Bobby!” A young kid of about five, wearing blue jeans and a white shirt with a superman logo on it, leaped from behind the bench. He landed on top of Danny and knocked him over.
         “Are you alright Dann- I mean Vlad?” Lacey piped up.
         “If annoyance was palpable, my precious sibling would probably be partial pulp from the pressure.” His voice was more of a sigh than anything.
         Deciding that Vlad needed some cheering up, she helped pull Bobby off of him then hopped onto the seat. “So, why are you so sad, like, all the time? You never talk, like, at all in class!” The effect her cheerfulness had on him was obvious as his face contorted into exasperation at her efforts.
         “Mommy says it’s ‘cause Dan is a em-mo and won’t go nowhere,” Bobby answered. “But brother always talks ‘bout hating life.”
         “How could you hate life?” spouted Lacey. “I love life! And, like, all my friends love it too so doesn’t everyone love life? It’s good.”
         Crypticly, Vlad responded with, “Due to its fallacy, your argument is inadequate.”
         “Huh?”
         In his ever caliginous tone, Vlad clarified, “Hasty Generalization is what you used. You and those you have amalgamated may believe life to be wonderful, but the conclusion that all believe so would be too quickly made. Thus your logic is flawed.”
         “Well,” Lacey continued her argument, “if you don’t love life then you hate it, and hating life is, like, really bad!”
         “Interesting it is, your use, just now, of two fallacies.”
         “Now what?” Lacey’s tone was becoming more agitated.
         “Antecedently inaccurate your argument was when you made use of a False Dichotomy. Neither to hate nor love life, it is possible, is it not? Dicto Simpliciter, being the second, in the end of your sentence is seen. One may hate life yet live a fulfilling existence. From yours, the opinions of others may differ, thus all do not believe hating life to be so abominable.”
         Eyebrows furrowed, Lacey tried to digest all the information she just heard as Vlad abruptly stood up, collected his younger kin Bobby and walked off. Lacey returned home to concerned parents as she was twenty minutes late.
         All the next day Lacey was thrown off of her usually buoyant mood. All she could think about was how depressed that kid Vlad was. All she wanted, Lacey also realized, was to continue that conversation and convince him of the backwardness in his beliefs. All the way through town, and very unlike Lacey, she walked while continuously dwelling on what their next conversation might bring and missed an old lady trying to cross a street, a man struggling to carry a TV out of a shop and a woman that had lost the keys to her car. After all, she thought, I wasn’t thinking too hard on what I said. All that kid said was the truth! I will make him happy though, I will!
         Finding her way to the park again, Lacey immediately spotted Vlad under the same tree, again on the ground and keeping Bobby, now wearing a gray shirt, away from him. “Hello again Bobby! And hi to you too D- … V.”
         “Hi weird girl!” Bobby exclaimed as he jumped around then proceeded to chase pigeons. That’s when Lacey realized that these two didn’t even know what her name was.
         “I guess I never told you my name Vlad.” Vlad switched his intense gaze at the caterpillar inching along the metal of the bench to Lacey.
         “You’re called Lacey.” His disconsolate look moved to the toadstool growing off of the wood of the bench.
         “How’d ya know my name?”
         “Because you are in my Biology class.”
         “Oh, ya, of course.” Lacey noticed that Vlad was sitting farther away from the bench today. “So I was thinking about what we were talking about yesterday and I thought about how, like, almost everyone is happy with whom they are. I asked, like, nearly all the kids I could whether they like life or not and they all said yes. And if everyone likes life then you must like it too!”
         “Fallacies are abundant in your reasoning.”
         “Oh come on! That made, like, perfect sense.”
         “Ad Populum. It is a vastly used yet acutely invalid reasoning. Although a plurality may advocate something, that fact alone does not necessitate that all must believe in or do that something.”
         “But there’s so much in life to enjoy! Take me for example. I like helping people and I like ice cream and I like school and I like my friends and I liked to swim in ponds, but now that I know what frogs do in them, not so much anymore… and I like my parents and I like my teachers and I like Mr. Snoogle-buns, the teddy bear on my bed, and I like meeting new people and I like traveling and I like marching band and I like colors and I like hugs and music and jokes and fun!”
         Calmly, Vlad persisted in his assault on her argument with his cool, composed style. “To me, all of your reasons consist of no relation. Your tangential inventory of the enjoyments in your life relates nothing to the fact that I abhor it. This is referred to as a Red Herring.”
         “Fine then!” Lacey had reached her last straw and now the fury hid for so long behind that wonderful personality snapped out. “Go on being your sad little self. Then in the future, when you’ve lived twenty years of your pathetic existence, you’ll just kill yourself! Or maybe even worse! You’ll extirpate someone else. Your sad little beliefs will make you advocate the reason to end someone else’s ‘dismal little life’. And then you’ll be psychotic and venture off on some fanatical killing spree! You’ll kill hundreds, maybe thousands!”
         “Impressive, the words that you used.” Admiration crept out in Vlad’s articulations. “Extirpate rather than kill, dismal in place of sad, fanatical instead of something like… rampaging. In you, perhaps intelligence is existential.” Then returning back to his monotonous self, “Oh, and devising a concatenation of occurrences culminating into some dire event is called a Slippery Slope, of which you just exercised.”
         “AAAAAAG! You’re sooo annoying!” Lacey yelled. Her voice rang through the air as she stomped away.
         Later that night, her parents noticed aberrant things with Lacey. Firstly, she was unpunctual in her arrival home, being thirty minutes early. She barely masticated just a minuscule portion of her dinner. Afterwards, she incarcerated herself in her room for the rest of the night. At school, the next day, it took much deliberation to pay attention to her classes and with much exasperation her toleration met an inclination for a vociferation.
         At the park again that evening, Lacey strode to the bench where Vlad, assuredly, lingered. The bench, which Lacey decided not to rest upon now, consisted of more small toadstools beneath, eggs upon the spider web and a playful Bobby, in a black t-shirt, watching two large caterpillars crawling across his arm. Vlad lay at least twenty feet away from the bench today.
         “So,” Lacey inquired of the uncanny Vlad, “where did you acquire that wardrobe?”

*          *          *          *

         Two teenagers sat in the shade of a tree, their garments all black, despite the roasting heat, on a beautiful sunny day. A young boy by the name of Michael was wandering through the park when he viewed these somber individuals. Walking up to them, he recognized their faces as two kids in his biology class named, oh what was it? Lacey and Danny? I think so…
         “Hey Lacey and Danny,” Michael called. “Whatcha up to?”
         “My epithet is not Danny”, Vlad spat with disgust. “I am called Vladimir.” Again, lightning seemed to come from nowhere on this cloudless afternoon.
         “And I,” added Lacey, “am known as Eve.”
         “Have you guys ever noticed how whenever Vlad says his name, lightning comes from nowhere?”
         With a measured yet mischievous glance at Vlad, Eve spoke, “And that, oh my flawed listener would be Post Hoc.”

The End