Storytime!
I wrote this story a little while ago during a fit of feeling useless.
Storytime!
There once was an old lady who lived in a shoe…Just kidding.
It seemed rather unlikely to find anyone in this town who appreciated a good nonsensical yarn. Everyone was so very obsessed with the right and proper way of doing things. With such limited goals and ambitions, without even alternative routes. You’d see on TV the romantic notions of human will conquering all, with love dominating obstacles. Though people would watch, and croon, and swoon, and desire it for themselves, they would never exercise their creativity. The ability to make their own stories seemed lost on them.
Instead, they would go through life, hoping and waiting for some cue, some line that would give them permission to act out their fantasies. Never once taking initiative, never even considering that the world around them was more capable of sustaining them than their artificially limited options allowed for.
You’ve got to eat, clearly; and you’ve got to have a place to live. You’ve got to have your diversionary entertainments, and you’ve got to pay your bills on time. So you’ve got to work for someone, and if you don’t have any time or money left when all that’s taken care of, well, that’s just the way it is. Your job allows for your life, so your job is your life. Your identity.
“So what do you do for a living?” she asked, obviously keen to categorize and glean whether I was worth her time.
“I fix things,” I replied.
“What kind of things?”
“Well, all kinds of things. If it’s broken, I fix it. Computers, televisions, radios, stopwatches, dishwashers, air conditioners, people, dental adhesives.”
“How do you find work doing something like that?”
“Oh, I don’t get paid for it. It’s just what I do to keep myself alive.”
“Nice! That last part is a little odd though”
“What isn’t? Everyone has to do something to keep themselves alive. Some people talk, some listen, some look at funny pictures of cats. I find things that are broken and I fix them. Even if it never has the capacity to thank me, I’m glad to have done something to help, to keep it running. To perpetuate existence.”
The silence in this corner of the room was palpable. That was the problem with conversation. Once you get past the scripted openings and their equally scripted responses you’re actually forced to think, and as a general rule, people don’t like to think.
“So…then, what do you do for money?”
“I make conversation at cocktail parties,” I leaned in closely. “I’m a pickpocket.”
She immediately recoiled with a hand on her purse, and after a moment of reflection, laughed. “So you’re a thief then?”
“Only on Tuesdays. On Wednesdays I’m a racketeer. On Thursdays I sell oranges on the side of the freeway, and Fridays and Saturdays are spent washing dishes in fancy restaurants.”
“What about Mondays?”
“I take Mondays off, nothing good ever happened on a Monday”
I never seem to be very good at conversations, either I kill them, or they kill me. An infinite combination of words and phrases in the English language allow anyone, anywhere, to string together a sentence that has never before been seen in all history. Not that you need to, ideas are simple, but the things that exist are far outweighed by the great many number of things that do not exist. Why talk about work and relationships when you can espouse the economical trials of inter-dimensional space vampires? As such, the rest of this story is clearly better off the way it is.
