The dominus Part 1

The dominus lives a life.  Just a life.  Not a good life, or a cursed life or an okay life.  Actually, he used to live a good life until he did something really bad and unspeakable (who knows who might read this some day!).  The bad thing he did was so bad that two things resulted from it.  First, he lost the capital ‘D’ in his name.  No longer would be he dominus with a big ‘D.’  And to make sure he didn’t cheat and capitalize the ‘D’ as the first letter of a sentence, the word ‘The’ was placed before dominus.  So he became known as ‘The dominus.’  Second, his good life was demoted to just life.

This second consequence actually turned out to be of some utilitarian use.  It sort of physicalized the phrase, “well, that’s life.”  If something unfortunate–not really devastating though–happened to someone, they would just shrug their shoulders and say, “well, that’s life.”  But many of the people that lived in Cavern didn’t really understand what that meant.  “What do you mean, that’s life?  Where is it?  I don’t see anything.  I can’t point to something ostensibly and say that it is life, can I?”  Living in Cavern robbed most people of the valuable skill of thinking common sensically.  But if The dominus was around, someone could point at life.  Well, sort of, at least.  The dominus was the closest physical thing there was to ‘life’ with no adjective coming before it.  Besides, even if you say I’m wrong, at least the confused person would look at The dominus and say, “Oh, okay, I see now.”  Close enough for them is close enough for anyone.