If I could stop the Wasting of All Time, by never asking why?

Then maybe I'd learn to be as the Wind and Rain; and maybe learn to fly.

If I could salve the deserts, hot and bare; with nothing more than Tears -

Then I'd fly around in the Wings of Night, and Cry for a Thousand Years.

The Universe sometimes tells us the worst possible joke we can imagine. Here is the joke I was told:

Once, in a place where the sun was hot on the ground, people in a place called Mesopotamia (lower tract of Babylon, near where Tigress and Euphretes and the Amazon collide) there was a place where a ray of the sun mercilessly beat the ground and there was much gold there. So the Babylonians figured that it might be fun to try to build a huge clay Bottle with a golden inside,…