Dear diary,
Let’s imagine a perfect day for ourselves. Let’s make ourselves a person in a realistic work of textual fiction, and dream up the perfect day for us to enjoy. Or maybe we can go longer than a day, if the vision seems to call for that — we’ll just follow our intuition. We’ll have our fiction take place sometime in the late nineteenth century.
OK, so we awaken in the middle of the woods, on the Coast of Coromandel. The sky is filled with lightning and thunderclouds; it is storming. It is freezing, so the rain is mixed with sleet and slush. We look around and see, to our right and to our left, in front and behind us, frozen bodies in the woods — these are our would-be brothers and sisters in this quest: they have died of exposure, naked and starving. We thus immediately recognize how lucky we are to have survived whatever preceded our birth in this fiction.
Now, remember, we’re trying to imagine the perfect day; that’s our whole reason for coming here. So the first thing we should do is try to find some clothes and some food. We scoop up a little of the slush from the surrounding leafy ground: it has a metallic taste and leaves us a little thirstier than we were before we tested it; but it doesn’t kill us. We make a mental note to ourselves: Don’t eat the slush.
Just now, lightning strikes us, leaving a thin, rod-like mark, lividly whitish, from the top of our forehead all the way to the bottom of our left foot. Looking down now at our bare feet, we notice they’re standing upon the slain Medusa’s headless corpse. “Keep moving; find a boat,” we say to ourselves; for we MUST get overseas to some other part of the fiction. (We’re simply following our gut.)
So, later that evening, we find a little boat tied to a willow tree, within a rocky cave. We loosen her chain, step in, and push her from the shore. “Goodbye, Coromandel!” we shout. It is still storming violently.
We float in our boat upon the ocean for forty days and forty nights. We are still naked and starving. Then, at last, we spot dry land. We’re so excited that we dive into the water and begin to swim to shore. The water is ice-cold. We reach the coastline, and it appears desolate: Nothing but pumpkins rocking in the strong wind, as far as the eye can see. We now grasp the fact that we’re back on Coromandel. Apparently we’ve been rowing in circles, all this time. We’ve reached the same place where we started.
However, we hasten to recollect, this is supposed to be the perfect day; so we do not give up. We resist the impulse to pick up one of the countless sharp icicles that line the coast, and use it to slit our neck, and to cut off our own head and toss it into the sea to appease Leviathan, as apparently the wise Medusa did, whom we accidentally offended earlier. We do not even succumb to the temptation to inflict upon our own person a fatal wound from one of the thousands of AK-47 assault rifles that litter the coastline. We just keep trudging forward, into the woods.
Eventually we stumble into a clearing. We stop to rest. Lying down, we espy, a few paces away, on the forest floor, a tattered sweater. We leap up and drape it over our body: it’s large enough to wear as a full outfit (we’ve grown quite thin from lack of food). So now we are clothed! We fall into a deep sleep, immediately. Days pass.
When we awake, we note that the storm has ceased and that we are almost comfortably warm. Both are due to our newly acquired outfit, we presume. So we arise, stretch, and recommence our trek.
Soon we find a source of clean water, and a warehouse of stored, dried food. So now we have sustenance. Our state is very near to perfection. We’re clothed and fed; now, all we need is shelter.
Just then we realize that we could use, as a place to sleep, the space that was cleared when we removed that bag of dried food from the warehouse: we could simply curl up there. So we killed two birds with one stone, when we found this dried food storage warehouse: it serves as our sustenance and our shelter. This is now officially the best of all possible worlds.
“But what if we develop gangrene in all our limbs?” we wonder aloud; “—for although we now have food, clothing, and shelter, we still cannot afford to buy medical insurance.” And some smarter part of our own mind answers promptly: “Don’t worry about that. Just build a garden and set up shop right here. If you die, you die. Human life is not that important.” So we go back to sleep.
Now, being that this is the first time since our birth that we’ve been able to sleep after eating actual food, we slumber HARD. There’s no way to keep track of the amount of time we remain asleep, because… Well, that would require someone to monitor us as we slumber, and to record the months on a calendar as they pass.
But eventually we wake, and of course we feel bored. We remember our self-advice to just tend our garden and hope that its produce has a positive effect on the stock market. So we take some of the gunny sacks from the warehouse that we’re using as our home, and dump their contents into the ground. Anything labeled “Seeds” we plant. Eventually crops begin to sprout up, and we harvest them. We then weld together a grain elevator and a silo, and lo: customers begin shuffling in our direction.
Our first customer places an order for ten bags of grain. The second customer in line orders twelve bags of grain.
In short, we become a successful businessperson, providing the whole globe with grains and seeds. We extend our business so that we also begin to sell fresh, hot, boiled potatoes. You can order them “to-go” or eat them right here in our dining establishment. We installed a number of thick wooden tables; the torch-light is dim, and the walls are gray brick. You stand at a table (there are no booths or chairs) and use your fingers to cut and eat your potato. There are no dipping troughs or salt. There is only coarse pepper, in a large wooden grinder. We also serve vodka.
Then our business fails, because we mismanaged it; but this does not mar the perfection of our day: it is a blessing in disguise, for now we move to New York City. We find a small apartment that’s not too expensive, and we walk the streets every day. We hail taxis and we also use the subway. We visit all the boutiques, and we soon develop a wardrobe of fine clothing. Before, all we owned is our one single oversized sweater; but now we own three dresses, five evening suits, sixteen ties, four summer hats, a see-thru blouse, and eighty-seven pairs of high-heel boots.
Now we land a job working as a clown at a so-called Green Rodeo; and that word green refers to the fact that all the whips and spurs are made from plant-based materials, and none of the animals are harmed during the performance: normally bulls are tormented as part of the festivities, but we substituted mechanical bulls for flesh bulls, and now we just let the flesh bulls graze in the field out back. You can look at them thru this window. (Do not tap the glass; it will cause a stampede.) Plus we phased out all our atomic weapons, and the whole amusement park is now powered by moonshine.
After the nuclear winter, we decided to take up lizard wrangling, as a hobby. We became a famous magician and employed lizards where previous maestros had used bunny-rabbits.
Then we manufactured a giant harpoon. We don’t know what we’ll use it for, but it was fun to develop. (Working on a development team can be a reward in & of itself; you get to meet new people, & sit at a long table with them, & shoot ideas back & forth; laugh, joke, & have fun; drink coffee together… Casual Fridays are the best.)
Then the religious zealots took over the earth, and at first we thought that would be insufferable, but it turned out OK. A strong community was established, and we shared interests and goals. The whole planet snapped into the harmony that its author intended for it. Then God himself appeared on the horizon, floating towards us. We (I speak now collectively, for all of humankind) were like a girl on prom night. It was really, really gentlemanly of him to come and date us like this. We all flew into the stars and had babies galore. He unveiled to us the secret way that gravity melds with all the other forces. Nowadays we spend most of our time dreaming up new worlds that were previously unimaginable; and they’re all good, just like this one.
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