Dear diary,
I don’t understand the desire to own the whole world, to be the richest man on earth. What I want is to have the whole world’s needs met, so that we can all easily coexist. It’s a simple idea, but apparently impossible to fulfill. I just think that if everyone were to be able to live without hustling and bustling to make ends meet, every individual would thaw out and at long last discover what she was put on earth to do. THAT state of things is far more interesting to me than possessing an entire showroom of shiny automobiles, and wall-sized gaudy aquariums filled with glowing fish, and whole choruses of dancers high-kicking to entertain us (and we’re not even watching them), and kilos of sugar, and money and guns.
Yes, I don’t think that enough has been written on the subject of how walking is superior to motorized-vehicling. The only reason that automobiles should exist is to transfer goods at long distances. So airplanes should exist, and so should big trucks with long trailers — these modes of transportation should be filled with food, clothing, and all sorts of supplies, from medicine to building materials, so that all people from all over the globe can have their needs met. But cars for personal use, such as cruising around the block in the motion picture American Graffiti (1973), should be unheard of. I don’t say that we should outlaw personal vehicles — on the contrary: anyone should have the option to drive a nice, shiny car anywhere; but the whole populace will have learned (after reading my journal posting) to value walking over driving: so they will forgo the sin voluntarily. Everyone will happily walk on foot everywhere, just like in the days before the invention of the combustion engine; and, I repeat, roads wide enough and optimized for motor-vehicles will exist solely for trucks distributing necessary supplies.
And here’s what an average day will be like, for someone living in the future. Your name will be Michael Angelo, and you will check your email and realize that today is a holiday: you must therefore prepare for a trip to see your family. Your family will live about three point five miles away, on the opposite side of the city. So you will pack a rucksack with meats and liquors: you will bring seasoned sausages; mustard; cheese; and two tanks of pinot grigio — that will serve for your mid-day meal, and for snacks along the way; then, for dinner, you will pack home-fried crispy chicken; sliced, boiled potatoes; some sort of pasta with thick, rich sauce; and six casks of white caribbean rum.
You will set out upon the pathway, afoot. It is not a dirt trail: we are not living in the distant past; we are, in fact, on the flipside of that coin: in the far, far future: so the roads are paved in gold. To your right are fields of grass and tall corn-stalks. Every so often a semi-truck roars past, carrying celluloid to Canada. You notice right away that a hooded figure is shadowing you at a distance, on horseback. Soon you note three additional figures; they eventually converge and form a group. They are the purveyors of the apocalypse. They’ve been trying to win humanity over to their product for ages now; but they’ve found, as yet, no buyers. So they’ve taken to following you.
After walking all thru the day and engaging in countless adventures, you teeter up to your destination. It is a white mansion in the advanced stages of decay. Your mother opens the door and greets you with tears in her eyes. “We feared we’d never see you again!” she sobs. Your sister is at the door as well; she has grown up: she’s almost unrecognizable compared to when you last saw her, which was back in the days of the Great Freeze and the Volcanic Earthquake — she was only nine years old, then. Now she’s a woman, and her hair is all frizzy. Her loose-fitting pinafore dress has a tropical pattern whose vibrant colors have faded.
They heft you onto a gurney, then haul you over and position you at the head of the dining table, between two enormous candles fueled by whale oil. (This brings to mind your days at sea.) You carve the turkey, using the two harpoons that they hand you for this purpose.
After the meal, your sister Rebecca plays the piano in the fully-lit ballroom, and all the guests begin to dance. You watch the festival from your gurney, quite satisfied with the sight of all this mirth. However, suddenly, at your right appears one of the horsemen mentioned earlier:
“Any interest in purchasing a share in the upcoming apocalypse, or making a contribution to begin the tribulations?” he says. “My name is Michael,” he adds.
“Tell ya what, Mike,” you say, “I’ll take TWO.”
“Two!?”
“Make that FOUR,” you shout, slamming your fist down for emphasis upon your gurney’s whalebone side-handle.
Archangel Michael scribbles out a receipt — “To Michael Angelo: ALL FOUR SHARES.”
You reach into your burlap undergarment and pull out a crumpled wad of paper money.
“Fifteen squid & thirty-three caesars. That should cover it,” you cry.
The horseman bows and rasps in undertone, “Thy will be done.”
So what happens is that the ballroom catches fire. So the party must relocate to the cow-barn. But then the barn catches fire. Next thing you know, a cold snap moves in from the pacific mideast and inflicts 90% of the populace with leg-wounds and stomach flu.
It’s important to note that none of your loved ones succumbed to these evils. They all either avoided the plagues entirely, or healed up quickly using drugs trucked in from Russia. So your family members were among the only survivors of the LORD God’s wrath. Now you inherit the earth, which is entirely desolate. It’s hard to grow crops, and everyone has a light cough that never quite goes away (and this is despite the fact that they were tough enough to power thru the aforesaid mass-extinction events).
“Where did you get all those banknotes,” says your mother. “I saw you pay the archangel with that wad of cash. Are you up to no good again?”
“Mind your own business, mother,” you say. “I am a painter of fresco masterworks. Does that fact not sufficiently explain how I ended up a billionaire?”
“Pay no mind to mom,” interjects your sister Rebecca; “—she’s just stressed out after more than twenty years without so much as receiving a phone call from you. We assumed you were dead. Not many Italian-Minnesotaners have been able to walk all the way to either coast and join two whaling missions at once, then return with enough cash to kick-start a biblical pandemic. Most speculators just get disappeared by the various intel agencies.”
“Well I’m not gonna waste my life washing dishes in that rinky-dink restaurant like father did,” you shout.
“Who is your father?” answers your mother. “Is it he who broke his back washing dishes, making an honest living? Or is it the fire from heaven that impregnated me, and whose name appears as ‘god act’ on your birth certificate? Did I raise you to amass shiny automobiles in a showroom, and then teach you how to conduct experiments upon them so as to determine with exactitude how long it takes for rust and moths to corrupt them? No, I do not quite understand the scientific method; instead, I always tried to make a point to attempt to endeavor to at least aspire towards making a move in the right direction.”
“Please, mom, you’re boring us silly with your attempts at good-neighborly-ism and presentableness,” says Rebecca. “Just stop.”
Now the room falls silent. The crackling flames can be heard in the background.
Here comes everyone’s favorite scene: As advertised, the Devil appears and sets up another table, on which is another turkey. The family sits down to eat. Michael Angelo is positioned at the head of the table and carves the turkey again. This time, the family performs the holiday rituals correctly. No fire is set to the ballroom. The charred cows in the barn are all taken away by bureaucrats in hazmat suits, and new animals are supplied by the LORD to serve as replacements. Now we have giraffes, llamas, mammoths, and a team of alligators to pull our sleigh. Best of all, all our library books burnt up in the last fire. So there’s no history at our back; we’re thus free to engage in all the errors afresh. We gain material success, which opens up the possibility of global dominance. The foregoing misery therefore is deemed to have been worth suffering. Now we enjoy a full hundred and twenty years of cruising around the countryside and pulling the rug out from under all the brick-and-mortar shops. Then, once the coast is clear, we establish our own franchise of eateries, and the entire population loves our guts, because our products meet their demands: they are cheap as for price, and passable as for quality. Plus every head-of-household is now in our employ; so they all have jobs. People can raise a family in our new system. Finally, we, the owners of this utopia, lie down in our bed and peacefully die in our sleep. Our dust returns to the earth as it was, and our spirit returns unto God who gave it; just as Ecclesiastes told us it would (12:7). So that’s why walking on foot is superior to riding in a motor-coach, and why a life of crime is preferable to a life of idleness.
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