Dear diary,
Now I arrive in Ancient Egypt and enter my Great Pyramid of Giza and declare to the magic mirror: “Everything’s too easily accomplishable; I want…”
“Hold on,” sez my mirror; “first, you must usurp back your house and throne from the present Ancient Pharaoh, who’s taken control since you ditched history’s plot. Otherwise I’m disinclined to help you.”
So I reluctantly go to war against the Ancient Pharaoh who happens to be ruling at that time. I execute a brilliant propaganda campaign that wins a substantial percentage of the populace to my side, and then we rehearse and perform a grand physical battle, and I alone win.
“As I was saying,” I address the mirror on the wall of my Great Pyramid, “everything’s too easily accomplishable; I want something that will allure me for ever and ever. I’m talking about an eternal preoccupation that I can enjoy pursuing but never quite get to the end of.”
“I think I understand your desire,” sez my magic mirror; “I recommend the pursuit to eliminate poverty. That’s a task that’s always maddeningly easy to achieve, but for some reason, age after age, instead of being eradicated, poverty remains — it even increases. Such a simple dilemma, yet mankind cannot solve it. Yes, I suggest that you take poverty as your nemesis.”
“My God, you’re smart,” I say to the mirror; “that’s why I came to ask your advice. I was in the future, trying to fight crime, but then in the process I became an even bigger criminal than any of my supposed adversaries; however, that turned out very easy to remedy, cuz I just went around apologizing and making amends by handing out cash settlements and sincere compliments. I even lent my motorbike to Executive Stevens; I hope he returns the favor someday. — Anyway, alright: I’ll go out there and pursue this impossible labor that is NOT accomplishable.” And, after kissing the mirror many times, I leave my pyramid.
First I stop at the café and order a butterscotch sundae. I plug in my laptop and check my Facebook account. I’m happy to see that I have fourteen notifications waiting to be perused — that’s a lot of action, for me. (A notification usually indicates that someone has clicked the heart icon next to one of my postings, indicating that they LOVE what I have electronically published.) Here’s what they turned out to relay:
Someone LOVED my butterfly photo. (Perhaps it reminded them of the transformations that life undergoes successfully, such as death.)
Someone else LOVED the photo of my unborn daughter — for I uploaded and publicly shared a copy of the sonogram from my ultrasound examination, after I learned that I am pregnant yet again.
A whole bunch of people LOVED my statement about hating pickles for lunch. One person even commented as follows: “Me too!”
A few people LOVED my “Life Update” where, a couple chapters ago, I broke the news that I quit my job as King of Ancient Egypt. (Note to self: I must update this status again, to reflect that I have gained back my prior position after a generation of struggle; for now I am engaged in the everlasting War Against Poverty, which so-called Science has declared unwinnable.)
And the rest of my notifications are just people LOVING the comments that I appended to other user’s posts — I always paste into the reply box the message “I love this!!” punctuated by an emoji of a Big Red Heart, basically to underline my clicking of the LOVE button.
Then I log out of my Facebook account and read the news for a while. It seems that poverty is rampant, and people are suffering everywhere more than ever before. I quickly type up my reaction to this news and mail a postcard to our governor. He instantly mails me a postcard back saying “I am the governor, but you are the KING; therefore, why don’t YOU do something about global poverty which is everlasting and exponentially increasing?” I nod while reading this and remark to myself aloud, forgetting that people sitting at nearby tables might hear me: “I like this poverty gig — it’s a gift that keeps on giving.”
So some very kind woman who overhears my remark comes over and drapes her arm around my royal robe and sez in a beguiling voice: “Can I assist you in any way? I couldn’t help but notice that you seem to be concerned about poverty.” Then she lifts her ankle-length skirt to show two or three more inches of her leg.
I take this woman back to my boardroom on my non-winged horse and we draw up some charts. We also draw up some graphs. We invent all our statistics from whole cloth. We tweak our findings to evince the heartrendingest reaction from our focus groups; then test and retest.
We now break for lunch. I eat half a ham sandwich, and she eats lettuce. Then I turn to her and say, “Are you still hungry? Should we steal seconds?” And she nods vigorously. So we return to the lunch line and select the foodstuffs that most appeal to us at that moment. We place these items into the pockets of our wizard robes. Then, sitting back down again, side-by-side in the cafeteria, we devour our score: I wolf down my piece of lettuce, and she eats half of her ham sandwich (she saves the other half for later).
I then stand up and make the grandiose gesture that means “Would you like to proceed to the arcade at the back of the establishment and play leapfrog?” And she accepts. So we play leapfrog until our meeting recommences.
When the rest of the month flies past, we notice, to our chagrin, that we have accidentally solved the Problem of Poverty; so now all souls are coasting along just fine. This angers me at first, because I really did want to embark upon a project that would be lasting; but then, after sleeping over this thought for a couple of nights — by “this thought” I mean the news that poverty is, at long last, permanently eradicated — I learn to relax and stop fighting reality: now I calmly tolerate the distasteful truth that my existence shall never NOT be annoyingly easy.
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