People Pleaser: Sophomore Jinx

Dear diary,

One of the reasons I’m so ornery is that the best moment in my life happened early, so everything’s been downhill since then.

It was my seventh birthday, and I went to school and distributed treats to my class. The tradition was that one should bring enough treats to share with all of one’s classmates on one’s birthday:

Most kids would just purchase a bag of those mini candies, which are marketed as “bite sized” or “fun sized” because they’re a small fragment of the size of the regular chocolate bar or candy box — they’re the kind of treat that’s normally given to children who go door-to-door begging on Halloween.

But my father worked as a dispatch manager for a trucking company at the time, and one of the trucks’ trailers got damaged, which ruined part of its shipment — I don’t remember what happened exactly, but let’s say that some gangsters shot up the side of the truck with their tommy guns, thus leaving bullet wounds in a percentage of the produce that was inside its trailer — so whatever was being shipped became the property of my father’s employer, in line with the proverb “you break it, you buy it” (for whatever reason, the damage from the gangster attack was considered the responsibility of the transport corporation that my dad was working for); so the trucking company had to replace the contents they were supposed to be delivering; but this meant that the non-damaged part of the partially ruined shipment got unloaded into the garage outside of my dad’s office: so my dad was able to go in there and salvage a crate of chocolate mints that didn’t have any bullet holes in it — and these were what I brought to share with my class, on my sweet seventh birthday.

Now these boxes of mints were not “bite sized” no, on the contrary: they were even bigger than regular “full sized” candy boxes — they were KING SIZED chocolate mints. So all my classmates were expecting me to distribute to them a single tiny box of candy apiece, but instead their eyes grew wide when they saw that I was apportioning one mega huge package of chocolate mints to every soul. They thot I was the World Savior or something. They couldn’t believe their luck. I made so many new friends that day, on account of my generosity (they assumed that I was generous, as if I had spent my own hard-earned money on the big boxes, rather than just passing forward a personal windfall that was only a detail of a far greater tragedy); and these new friends lasted for at least a week or two before they returned to being regular acquaintances.

But for a short time I was praised as Mister Candyman. Even my teacher couldn’t believe her eyes, when I tossed one of the boxes onto her desk, and it landed with a thud.

So I learned that people love when you give them free stuff. And since I’m rather poor in real life, I’ve never since been able to surprise anyone with the same type of gifts. So that’s why I wish that I were God, cuz then I could answer everyone’s prayers to their liking:

Just think how good God must feel when a little girl prays for a pony, and the next morning she awakes to the sight of a large white horse standing there in her bedroom.

What would you do, if you were God — would you make people beg for their deserts? Rumor has it that God knows what every person wants prior to their praying for it, because God can read minds.

“Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.”
—Jesus (Matthew 6:8)

So if you were God, you could either make people go thru the formality of mouthing an official prayer, before you grant them their happiness; OR you could crouch poised above their head and watch like a hawk until a thot pops in their mental bubble; then immediately you could swoop down and cause that desired item or service to manifest: and they’d be overjoyed, because, even before they had a chance to comprehend that they were yearning for X, you procured for them X — in other words: they would be filled before even feeling anhungered! — that’s preemptive satisfaction.

A man who owns a fleet of Cadillacs might think to himself: “Oh if only I had just one more Cadillac”; and BAM! — straightway he would note that an additional Cadillac had been driven onto his lot. (When did this happen? I don’t recall anyone delivering any new shipments!) The man would smile brightly; then he would run to the telephone booth and immediately call all his loved ones, to spread the good news.

A teenage boy whose face is ravaged by acne might cry himself to sleep, muttering curses under his breath, on account of his ugliness (this, by the way, is how I myself felt as an adolescent: I had the worst case of acne — it completely ruined any self-esteem that I might have developed — and I prayed nightly for God to clear up my complexion, but it only got worse; even to this day I’ve never quite gotten rid of it: I’m now in my mid-forties, and I still get unsightly blemishes whenever I’m stressed); but then, the next morning, the boy might awake and look in the mirror and discover that his skin is now smooth and healthy: he is even almost handsome. Then his next thot is:

“Perhaps now the girl next door might come to my house and ask to wed me.”

And just while he’s thinking those last two words, his doorbell rings: ding-dong! (And note how the sound of the “ding” overlaps the word “wed” while the “dong” chimes right on “me”.) He opens the door, and of course it’s the neighbor girl standing there. She is paying the lad a visit. They fall in love and have three kids.

Or say that a family is living in an urban area, in a rundown apartment, and the father cannot find a job, so he can’t pay the rent, and they are about to get evicted, thus rendering them homeless. — If I were God, I would step in and cause a church shelter to offer this family a number of cans of soup. And I would grant the city an extremely mild winter, so that nobody who is sleeping outdoors has to freeze.

Best of all, the U.S. President’s golf game would improve. Every swing would be perfect, and the ball would land right in the hole. It would be tremendous. And therefore his score would always correspond to the number of holes that he is playing, since each hole would require only a single stroke to complete: for a 9-hole round, his score would be nine, exactly; and for an 18-hole round, he’d score precisely eighteen — for every shot is a hole-in-one! And this would greatly reduce the stress of scorekeeping; moreover, it would lessen the temptation to cheat; thus, far less pencil lead would be wasted, and the eraser on the pencil would not get worn down so quickly. You could basically have all the scorecards be pre-printed, at least for your own performance.

I’d also have all the caddies appear to be extremely attractive young women, each of whom the President would rate as 10 out of 10 for beauty. (Now, when I say “caddies” I don’t mean the type of luxury vehicle that I donated to the man from the Cadillac Motor Car Division a few paragraphs above, altho some people do use that same word as a shortened nickname for those models of horseless carriages — no: in golf, a caddie is a young woman who carries a player’s clubs and pulls his rickshaw, while periodically offering moral advice in a sultry tone.)

And, speaking of presidents, whenever there is an election, I would look into the mind of the voters, and I would cause whichever candidate they find most delightful to get the most votes — and I would do this before anyone even voted. So this would free up a lot of time, since you could just close down a lot of the polling places, and use the day to go spear-fishing instead. I’d announce the results early, too, so as to eliminate any suspenseful period of wondering.

But if there are some citizens who actually enjoy the process of watching the results of each state get reported slowly during the course of an evening — perhaps these citizens invite over to their apartment a few of their friends, and they all half-observe the proceedings together, while cheering for their preferred candidate; and snacks and beverages are served; so it’s rather like a party — in this case, I would make the television program that they’re gathered around display a performance the likes of which they’d never seen before: it would be a really fine show, and it would end exactly as they desire. The newsreader would report that their favorite candidate won the most votes, and now they can all breathe a collective sigh of relief, for the country is in good hands.

Additionally, most of the couples who attended this vote-tallying party would wind up in bed together, at the end of the night — I mean that the partners of a given couple would lie on the same futon, fully clothed, and they would sink into dreamless sleep that would last for eight hours: I do not mean that each couple would swap its partners with other couples, or that they would all climb into one giant bed together after disrobing; for that might lead to unwanted births, following the average period of gestation for humans.

However, on second thot, I could simply figure out which of the pregnancies were truly planned, and bring those to term and grant them health, and trail them throughout their life and keep blessing them, while the pregnancies that proved unwanted I could simply cause to miscarry naturally. That way, everyone would get precisely the life that they lust for.

Ah yes, and I would not forget the clowns. Any clown who hates having to do his own makeup — he hates having to put it on and take it off, every day — I will cause his clownish mein to abide forever: the white face-paint will be like a tattoo that doesn’t wash clean; and the red nose will become a permanent fixture: not even a strong man can yank it off your face. The fake teardrop on your cheek will be a real gem, steadfastly affixed with superglue.

And people who currently do sex-work for a living but who would rather switch careers will receive an offer in the mail to become a librarian. They’ll go down to the county offices and have a meeting with an advisor who will write them a note that they can bring to the local branch’s administrator, and the note will read: “This one’s got what it takes: Let him start in the 500s, just briefly; then rapidly promote him to the 800s,” referring to the Dewey Decimal Classification, which is structured around ten main classes whose numbers cover the entire world of knowledge. (The 500s deal with Science, which is shit, albeit necessary; and the 800s begin to veer towards the Poetic Genius.)

And if someone’s sneaker comes untied during a race, or while they’re trying to flee from overwrought cops, I’ll personally tie up their shoelace, so that they can succeed in their getaway mission. I’ll also arrange the outcome so that they win first place.

Any natural blondes who wish they were brunettes, I will mail them nice wigs. And natural brunettes who wish they had been born as redheads, I will cause them to be Born Again in the fashion they fancy.

I’ll even go so far as to answer the prayers of those Christians that got so upset when Jesus didn’t return. If you wanna see a man coming out of the sky surrounded by clouds, I’m willing to do that. I’m interested in seeing if I can satisfy every last person; like those machines that vibrate, which cause women not to need men anymore. The only thing I’m NOT willing to do is be mean to a certain group of people on behalf of any other group — like, if the Christians want me to utterly destroy “all the Jews and Muslims”, as they keep shouting privately inside their thot-bubbles (which, thankfully, only I can see) (for not even they themselves are aware of the bulk of their own deepest drives), I refuse to do that — remember: I’m trying to please everyone, and that means everyone.

But I am willing to go so far as to search thru the desires of a given people until I find something that they all genuinely want for themselves, which, when granted, will cause them to look silly in the eyes of a rival group. For instance: if the menfolk among the Christians and the Egyptians all want close-cropped hair, I’ll give them their wish; and then if the Israelites and the Philistines all want long beards and a certain style of foreskin, I’ll get the job done — and then each of these groups can glance over at the other and say “Ha! God allowed their bloom to fade; he must love us more.” As long as both groups are thinking that they are the favored ones, and neither actually causes any harm to the other, I’ll allow it. But that’s only because I know that once they’re sure that they’ve been proven to be my most precious & coveted toys, in no time they’ll begin to feel pity for their adversaries, and they’ll treat them with lovingkindness, to try to make up for the fact that they got a better blessing than these sad infidels.

For the truth is that as soon as any individual achieves his or her own ideal aspect, he or she now appears goofy-looking to everyone else. I find this solemnly hilarious. (It’s the meaning of life.)