DeBeers, "A diamond is forever."

To whom it may concern,

When I first heard one of your commercials say that “a diamond is forever,” I was immediately skeptical. As a child, I dedicated much of my time to destroying things, whether they be LEGO towns my brother created, snowmen my brother built, or dating relationships my brother entered. You may ask my brother, who has grown up to have an unhealthy fear of both women and me. He also has a recurring dream in which I sneak into his room at night and dump a large bucket of spiders and worms on his head, but that is another story entirely.

I digress. I simply wanted to make it clear that I know a thing or two when it comes to showing that nothing is forever, whether it be my brother’s sanity or his interest in women. Anyway, I purchased three diamonds from a DeBeers store, hoping to prove that your slogan is wrong, and that your corporation is built upon a lie, much like my brother believes many of his relationships are/were.

I set myself to the task with gusto. I began by placing one of the diamonds on a table and hammering it, but my hammer soon broke. So I took a propane torch and placed the diamond in the flame for two whole hours, but all that came of that was making the diamond black and making my eyes hurt from watching. So, I took a rather heavy sledgehammer and smashed the dickens out of the fucking thing. After wailing on it for about an hour, I found to my unbridled joy that the diamond was utterly annihilated, with only scattered dust left. This I swept into my hand and, after grimacing at it intently for several minutes, in one burst of breath I blew it across the room in a shower of sparkling, obliterated decadence.

I like to think of my experiment as scientifically rigorous, and I was fully invested in destroying the other two diamonds in spectacular fashion, but I soon realized that I had misplaced them, or they had been stolen. I was furious, but after taking a sledgehammer to nearly all of the walls in my apartment, I realized something important. In some sense, my work had been done for me. ‘Foreverness’ cannot simply be defined by whether something can be rent apart into its base elements. Life is not forever, not because our bodies decay, but because, after our spirits leave our bodies, they are gone forever. Something can be gone forever even if it is not destroyed. But if you disagree, I still blasted the bejesus out of that one gem. Do you still think that your diamonds are forever, DeBeers? Do you?

Cordially,
Michael