How we got here, vol. 2

By now, some of you perhaps have recognized “How we got here, vol. 1” as a history. A history of sorts, at any rate. A history lesson at best, which is not the same as to say that I know more history than the next person. I do not.

Depending on who the next person is, I do not.

I say only that it is a history lesson and that I am the one writing it, for good or ill.

When we last saw Steve and Bill, you’ll remember, they were back in their small town staring at the desert, having made a real balls of it.

They died.

Just like that.

Miserable failures.

Their families, to be known hereafter as the Stevesons and the Billsons, maintained their arrangement nonetheless, although for the life of me, I cannot fathom why.

One day, some British people came to town. One of them might have looked like Peter O’Toole. The British people said, “Hello, there. We hear you don’t like the Ottoman Empire! Well, neither do we. Let’s get them.”

And so they did.

At the finality of all the getting, things were much changed. For starters, the whole bit of land now became known as Stevey Arabia, which I imagine would have pleased Steve greatly, had he not been quite so dead. And Billism, Bill’s very simple heart-, brain-, and poetry-impaired twist on the faith, well, that all got a big boost.

And then imagine everyone’s surprise when Stevey Arabia turned out to be sitting atop the world’s second largest ocean of oil! The Stevesons were not just powerful now. They were rich and they were powerful, plus they had that old arrangement with God.

This was a recipe for something. Definitely for something.

Foreign workers came from near and far but mostly from other desert places. These workers worked in the oil fields and they learned about Billism, so when they went back to where they’d come from, Billism went with them.

Went, that is, everywhere. Near and far.

That is how we got here.

Where we are. In history.

And we all lived happily ever after.