Written by Mel Reichler and Jim Egan
Copyright 2002
Moments
At fifteen you hear the crack of the bat but all you are interested in is girls. At twenty seven you see the ball is heading your way. At thirty seven the ball is so close you can easily reach out and grab it but you’ve lost interest in the game. At fifty you they have shut off the lights and you are on your hands and knees searching for the game ball.
Some people have two childhoods, one too early, one two late.
Your daughter walks impatiently by your side. Thirteen, she is surfing the cusp of adolescence. You feel a desperate need to talk to her about life and help her avoid the mistakes you made. She is distracted, not listening, anxious to get to a soccer game to see the boy who has been flirting with her. Speaking quickly, you tell her about life’s disappointments, about how quickly it goes by, about how important it is to seize what time you have. Your daughter shakes her head tossing off your words like drops of water. She looks at you intently for a moment then rushes off. You watch as she disappears wondering what she is thinking.
The warning shot warns the shooter.
You creep into bed but you can’t fall asleep. You replay the scene on the stage in your head but it turns out as badly in your imagination as it did in real life. You refuse to accept the loss. You rewind your memory and try to force the outcome to change. It turns out badly again. Drowsy, you fight sleep fearing that dreaming will thicken and solidify the episode in your mind and you never will be able imagine a different outcome. You struggle against sleep as you run through the encounter again and again bringing in more characters, changing settings , changing furniture , changing voices and gestures, color and sound, changing every detail you can remember. Nothing you do alters the outcome. Finally, morning comes and, as the day breaks, sun streams though your window and you give in to sleep.
Armies never surrender at night.
Your eyes meet across a room packed with people. You try to be cool and laid back but she is so striking your eyes hungrily caress the features of her face. Your face has entangled her too. You make your way through the crowd to her. She meets you half way. Up close, her hair, her eyes, her scent, each detail is a piece of an exotic puzzle. You’re clever, witty, you do your best to hide your desire. She’s cool, confident and she wants to sell you life insurance.
Beauty is always bait for one trap or another.
As a boy you wanted to be a hero, but now, as an adult you are a tax accountant whose heroic acts consist of balancing extremely shaky accounts with keystrokes of a computer. You look out of your office window and see smoke coming from the building next door. You could climb across the fire escape and rescue people. You remind yourself that you are very high up, the street is very far down, and that you are not being paid to be hero. Heroism is best left to professionals You are about to move away from the window when the smoke blows past a billboard advertising sneakers saying ‘Just do it.’ You are out the window before another thought crosses your mind.
The improbable is just the impossible with a license.
You are watching children fly kites. You remember you once spent weeks building an elaborate kite that soared upward, spinning its string off of the spool and disappearing forever. The pain of the loss of weeks of work tore you apart, but, even now, you remember the graceful dance that the kite made as it sailed away. Now, a few weeks work doesn’t seem so high a price for a flight that has lasted thirty years.
For a present you get a moment.
A woman walks out of a dream and into your life. Every part of her calls to something deep inside of you. She feels it too. You both throw caution to the wind. After a hurried dinner, you find yourself in bed with her. You wince as you realize that in the heat of passion you plunged into one another, without any thought of protection or consequences. As you stretch out looking into one another’s eyes she smiles. “If it’s a girl we’ll name it after my mother, a boy after your father.” You think she’s joking when she suggests looking for a larger apartment just in case. It is only when she begins making a list of safe stocks to invest the money you will put away for the child’s education that you realize she is deadly serious.
Buffalos don’t come with brakes.
You are in a fine wine shop. In front of you, two connoisseurs are comparing vintages. Each holds a bottle of wine forcefully championing its virtues.” Sophisticated, very elegant, very Bordeaux,” one says, to which the other counters, “subtle nose, earthy undercurrents, sunny part of the vineyard.” In front of them a couple, effervescent with youth, scarcely old enough to buy liquor, are waiting to pay for a vin ordinairre. You can see the night they are anticipating. Nina Simone sings to them as they roll around on the floor, a thin, threadbare carpet underneath them. Uneaten slices of pizza curl in their box. The nearly empty bottle of wine is knocked over, it seeps under the blanket lying beneath them making a stain but they do not notice it.
Youth is filled with deprivations. What makes it youth it that it is ignorant of them.
Children run and tumble in the summer grass. Its greenness invites you to join them. You remember the sound of gravely dirt sliding under your sneakers, the feel of the park grass under your body as a ten year old, the windmill flailing of legs and arms. Your feet pull you towards them but suddenly you think of your new Armani suit, your bad back and your dignity. The impulse shrivels and you clutch your newspaper and turn away.
All of us outgrow childhood, only the luckiest of us outgrow adulthood.
In bed, in the middle of the night, you dream of her. You wake sweating confused. The dream replayed the magical times you had when you were deeply in love with one another.
As you paddle to the kitchen for a drink of water the darkness encourages you to remember the moments that lit up your life. The squabbles that filled the days and nights before you broke up seem unreal, insubstantial, artificial against the remembered mystery of her touch.
You begin to think breaking up was a mistake. You call up her face in your mind. Your step quickens and you slam your foot into the dresser. The sharp, intense pain punctures your thoughts, releasing the memories that the darkness held back, the constant arguments, the fights, the hell togetherness became. Your thirst evaporates and you rush to the bed and pull the covers over your head.
Rub a thorn, remember the knife.
You are in an ice cream parlor waiting in line to get a pint of vanilla ice cream. At a table, two pre-adolescents, their feet barely reaching the floor, sit licking cones of purple and green. Face smeared with purple ice cream turns to face smeared green and says: “Are you still spraying walls?” “No,” green ice cream replies, “I got tired of a one person dialogue,” to which her friend says, “I always thought of graffiti as a two person monologue.” After a minute of thinking, green tongue responds, “Well, anyway intelligence sucks.” Wiping her mouth on her sleeve, purple ice cream replies, “and wisdom spits out.”
Some truths are hard to take seriously such a pistachio truths.
You have just returned from your first trip to a foreign country as a salesman for a large multinational conglomerate. The government of a small, very recently formed, impoverished third world country wants a large shopping list of heavy duty machinery and electronics. You are sent to close the deal.
The trip is a disaster. The country is in turmoil. There are three competing revolutions going on., no electricity or water and the phones don’t work. Periodic explosions rock your hotel.
You are driven around the capital by an
You decide it is impossible to complete the deal and make arrangements to leave the country. You wait three days for an airplane and return home depressed. As you are getting ready to go into your boss’s office to tell him of your failure he rushes in with congratulations. The contract has been returned signed and a large sum of money has been deposited in the company’s bank account.
There are places so steeped in anarchy that even Murphy’s law does not hold.
You are touring Europe with no set destination, no itinerary — no mountains to climb, no list of churches or museums or ruins to visit. You move by whim and impulse and let chance lead you from place to place. You ask the man behind ticket window of the railway station what city the very next train is going to. He mentions an unfamiliar name, you buy the ticket as he tells you to rush because the train is about to leave. You run for it arriving at the platform just as the station master is closing the gate. He does not want to let you in. “You are late, the train is leaving the station,” he scolds You argue forcefully for a moment and he relents. You run to the train and, flush with a sense of triumph, pull yourself into the car just as the train starts to move. As train pulls slowly out of the station you notice a beautiful woman who stares at you invitingly from a bench on the platform.
We mourn in our victories the death of possibility.
You are wandering around the city on your lunch hour looking for a place to have a hamburger when something draws you to a movie theatre that is showing a foreign film. You never go to a movie without reading at least two reviews, and you hate films with subtitles, but suddenly, on an impulse, you decide to see the movie.
It is set in some indeterminate country. You can not identify the language and the subtitles flicker making them almost impossible to read. The hero is played by a short, squat, dark skinned man dressed in a patched brown suit. But the movie captures all of the struggles and contradictions that make up your life. It is as if the film was made just for you and promises to reveal the answer to the mystery of your life that has eluded you.
It carries your life it up to exactly where you are. In the film, the hero is drawn into a theatre to watch a film in English. It is going to reveal the mysteries of his life to him. You are pulled to the edge of your seat struggling to read the subtitles, waiting. Suddenly, the man in the brown suit gets up and leaves the theatre and the movie ends abruptly. The lights go on and the ushers begin to sweep the theatre.
Darkness also travels at the speed of light.
The woman you have been trying to get a date with for months finally agrees to have dinner with you. She suggests that after eating you go to a poetry reading. An unpublished poet will be reading from his latest book of poems. Although you have no interest in poetry, you agree, hoping that the poetry will put her in a mode for making love.
The poet is a small, flamboyantly dressed man with a lisp who skips and hops nervously as he reads his poetry. The woman is disappointed in the poetry but it cuts into you like a knife. Her indifference leads to a bitter argument and you drop her off wondering what you ever saw in her. The next day you find it difficult to get up and go to work. The day after that, your life completely unravels. You quit your job, begin to hang out in coffee houses. The poetry you heard rolls around in your head accompanied by strange pictures and silences that drown out human voices.
You drift around aimlessly for a few months, spending lots of time in parks just watching people. You struggle to get hold of your life but the slighted breeze blows it out of reach.
One day, out of the blue, your old boss calls and offers you your job back. You grab at the chance. You have your apartment cleaned, and begin dating again. But as you resume your old life you notice that your world has subtly altered. Your taste in women, in wines, in scotch has changed. Time flows in quatrains and silences are filled with unwritten poetry.
People seldom survive the bite of the butterfly but the scars of bite of the butterfly bite are beautiful.
On your way to work one day, waiting for a light to change, you hear a scraggly Indian guru preaching on the street. For a reason you do not understand his words seize you. You quit your job, abandon family and country and follow him to India to seek enlightenment. In a dirty robe, you beg for your living, scavenge to meet your needs. The struggle for enlightenment seems hopeless but you persist.
One day, begging on the street near a big hotel, you meet an old friend from home who recognizes you. He hugs you warmly and fills you in about what has happened since you left. Your wife and children refuse to give up the hope that you will return to them. Wracked with guilt, your parents are still heartbroken. Your friends whisper to one another about your coming to India as a suicide and wonder if there was something they could have done to prevent it. As he speaks of your old life, you realize that you have made a bizarre mistake.
In one sharp and painful instant of illumination you see your
quest for enlightenment in
When you see the light its wonderful but sometimes you yearn for the darkness again.
A young Turk, a VP, in a large corporation, struggling against dinosaurs, challenged by small minds with old fashioned ideas, you get traction and begin to move. The division you head has become the cash cow of the company. You decide it is time to take on the old guard in earnest; artificial intelligence and computers are your secret weapon. At a meeting to plan the next phase of the corporation’s growth, you sketch out a proposal to introduce a radical intelligent, computerized technology that will automate routine corporate processes.
The dinosaurs, paper and pencil people, press you for details but you blow them off saying the details are mere technical issues. The CEO is responsive. He tells you to implement the scheme. Your opposition is devastated. To celebrate your victory, you take your secretary out for dinner and the night you spend together in bed looks like the beginning of a torrid romantic affair. You turn the work of implementing your plan to a consulting firm and spend most of your time pursuing your secretary.
Before long, an employee of the consulting firm you hired comes into your office and tells you they are ready to initiate first phase of your plan. The company is being completely reorganized. Your job has being eliminated. You are being replaced by a new computer system that will run the newly automated plants, intelligent filing and dictation machines are in place and secretaries are a thing of the past. All you will need in your new position is a Palm and a phone.
Big things change because people are too smart for their own good: little things change because they are not smart enough.
A scientist wins a Nobel prize for scientific work that revolutionizes physics and mathematics. At the awards dinner he makes a speech about the importance of good sex in a scientist’s life. Afterwards at an impromptu press conference the reporters gather around him. “Were you a good student in public school?” they ask. He replies that he spent his time reading comics. “Did your genius show up in high school?” He answers that he was suspended for most of high school too and spent most of his time doing cross word puzzles and playing ping pong. “In college what did you major in?” He says he does not remember but mentions that he went to graduate school at Princeton for a year but did not like it so he went to Mexico to do graduate work but spent most of his time on the beach water skiing. The reporters walk away shaking their heads and muttering among themselves that he’s a moron and his achievements are the greatest accident in the history of science.
Genius is the capacity not to learn what it takes most of us a lifetime to forget.
A photo of your husband in the arms of your best friends falls out of the pocket of one of his coats that you are taking to the cleaners. You stare at the picture on the floor. He is wearing the smile he saves for the bedroom -- the one you thought was reserved only for you,
Clenching your teeth, you stare at the photo as if it was one frame of a motion picture and run the film in your head. The movie ends with you grabbing a baseball bat and smashing his record collection, his stereo, his car, his head. Then, the more mature solution occurs to you; talking things over with him, seeing a therapist, trying to put your relationship back together piece by piece to where it was when you were deeply in love with one another.
You swallow your anger and are about to choose the adult solution when another even more intimate photo falls out of his pocket.
Its baseball bat time.
In a pinch you can use a hammer as a screwdriver but only once per screw.
You are ready to make your move. It is dangerous, very very dangerous. But in one flurry of buying and selling you can make enough for a lifetime, free yourself from attachment to the computer and from Wall Street’s random walks; one series of trades to freedom, three minutes to a life on a beach in Hawaii. You have examined the dangers, meticulously scrutinized the details. You are confident your timing is perfect.
On the first buy, the stock will move up 12 points. On the second, the stock will rise 10 points, after the third it will settle, but the fourth will pump it up another seven. Sell half, watch it fall two points, sell the other half and shut down your machine. You will not have to watch its complete collapse minutes later. You check out the dangers from the East, from the North, from the South, from your government, from the Japanese, from the Germans, from the English and the French, from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
You make the buy. While you wait to make the second, the voice of CNN’s reporter from the TV behind you gets louder. You shift your attention from the computer screen showing the progress of your trade to the television reporter announcing breaking news.
The president has fallen down a flight of steps and is in a coma. The vice president tried to break his fall and tumbled after him and had a fatal heart attack. The reins of government have passed to the hands of the head of the House of Representatives, who is isolated hunting geese in Wisconsin. You turn back to the screen which says your transaction is complete, and stare at a pop up window that flashes general market activity. You watch as the indexes take a deep breath then collapse. Another pop up screen flashes its programmed red indicating a disastrous turn of events and you watch your position crumble also.
For the ant, wisdom is not walking on sidewalks even if the cracks are filled with cake and candy.
A man stays late drinking with his friends and forgets the date he has with his girl friend. When he realizes he is two hours late he hurries to her apartment. On the elevator he tries to think of an excuse but nothing comes to him until he sees her unhappy and angry face when she answers the door.
“Darling, I’m sorry I’m late he says but the most unusual thing happened.” The girlfriend looks at him suspiciously. “Two hours ago I was only a block away when this man approaches me. He was disheveled and, dirty but he didn’t really look like a homeless man. He asked me for some money but before I could respond he says, “I’m dying, It’s to help me make a visit to the grave of my beloved.”
The man’s girlfriend’s face softened. “He wanted to visit the grave of his beloved,” she said, opening the door and waiting until he got in. “The grave of his beloved.”
Once in the apartment the man wants to end the story quickly but his girlfriend waits for him to continue. “I told him I was in a hurry but he held me like the ancient mariner. ‘Hunger is not important or thirst. But I have to get to the graveyard where she is buried one more time before I die. We were in love, about to get married,’ he continued not taking the dollar I offered. I could not help myself, I let him lead me over to a stoop and we sat down and he told me this story, about the woman he loved. I’m really sorry I’m late,” the man continued but his girlfriend’s face told him she wanted more of the story.
“I wanted to pull away but he held me,” the man continued. “’She was a gypsy,’” the bum said. “’Her father had promised her to a voivode, a powerful gypsy of her tribe, but she defied him and fell in love with me.’”
“To another man,” the lips of sad face in front of the man telling the story echoed.
“’I went away on a business trip,’” the bum continued. “’when I returned she was dead. Her father had come with some other men of her vista to take her away to be quickly hitched to the man to whom he had promised her but she broke away and killed herself.’”
“Killed herself,” the girlfriend’s echoed, her eyes filled with tears.
“He took a while to tell me the story that’s why I’m late,” the boyfriend said.
“What does lateness matter between people who are alive and in love,” his girlfriend said throwing her arms around her boyfriend.
The virtuous whore is the invention of the virtuous pimp.
A sophisticated person who appreciates the finer things in life, walks by a display of the work of a street corner painter which consists entirely of portraits of clowns. He remarks to the friend he is walking with what banal clichés they are but one of them attracts him. He sneaks back alone later and buys the painting. He can not explain to himself the pleasure he experiences looking at it even though he knows it is cheap, unsophisticated and common. He hangs it facing the wall of his room and turns it around only when he is feeling depressed and unhappy. Looking at it fills him with immeasurable pleasure but he can not help criticizing the painting for its lack of style and sophistication because it is commonplace and a little bit ugly.
It is nowhere written that you have to be pleased with what satisfies you most.
Your mother calls and tells you your aunt has had a heart attack. You complain about the demands of family life and you tell her you there was an emergency at work and you are going to be at the office all night. Then your father calls and tells you your cousin has been in a car accident. You complain about the unreasonable expectations people have just because they are relatives and you tell him you are on your way to your best friend’s funeral and that you will visit your cousin the first chance you get. Then your boss calls and tells you a project has come up suddenly and he desperately needs your help at the office. You tell him your aunt has had a sudden heart attack and your cousin has been in an accident and you are on your way to the hospital and you’ll probably be busy with relatives all night. Then your girlfriend calls and tells you she has the itch, and you tell her you’ll be over right away.
Virtue is always unreasonable, vice never.
You sit down with your eight year old daughter who has asked you about sex. You realize that she is bright and curious and has seen enough movies and television, read enough teen magazines that you have to be ruthlessly honest with her.
You talk about love, about family, about babies. You talk about different sexual preferences, about the mechanics of the sex act. She looks at you unsatisified as if there is an important point that you have left out. You struggle trying to figure out what you have ignored and can think of nothing. She thanks you politely, gets up and skips off and you sit vaguely dissatisfied with yourself as an adult and as a parent.
Sex is a pleasure: good sex is pleasure: great sex is what pleasure is about.
Walking to work you notice a group celebrating on a street corner. They are ecstatic, leaping and cavorting. One of them buttonholes you.
“Gtobious has broken the record, the record, the record, the record,” he sings. “14 minutes, 3.5 seconds. Christ, no one before was able to do it for more than 11. “
“11?”
“11. And he goes and does it 14. Unbelievable,” he repeats. “And him drunk and naked and shivering. 14 minutes. Christ. Amazing.”
“Amazing.” You drift off as the man catches his breath and begins jumping around again.
You wonder who Gtobious is and what record he has broken.
It is only to animals that hop about, that flying is spectacular.
Your grandfather is visiting. While you are sitting alone with him. He pulls something from his pocket. “I have a gift for you,” he says. You hope it is some money to buy a monster truck you have seen on television.
“What is it?”
“A map,” he says.
“Where did you get it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, “It’s a map of a place where there’s a treasure.”
“What kind of a treasure?”
“A treasure. It was mine now its yours.”
You take it greedily.
“Between us,” he says, finger to lips.
You take it to your room and look at it. Every day after that, rain or shine, snow or sleet, you look at the map. Surreptitiously sometimes you spread it out. What is the treasure, on what continent, in what country, at what latitude what longitude? Your grandfather dies before you have a chance to talk to him about it.
You struggle with the mystery as you grow up, and begin your own family. When you retire you spend more time staring at the map. You are frustrated, angry at your Grandfather, angry at yourself. You decide to burn it but when you light the match you can not get yourself to set fire to it. It seems to precious to wantonly destroy.
You try to treat it as a joke, an old mans joke but you can not shake off the notion of a treasure waiting somewhere to be found. You think of giving it to your grand child but decide against it. When you die they find it in your dresser underneath to the watch your father gave you and bury you with it.
Some things cost more to break than to fix, more to keep than to throw away
You have always wanted to own your own business. You quit your job borrow some money and strike out on your own. You sacrifice your friendships, deprive yourself of time with your family in order to grow the business. Your wife leaves taking your children saying she needs a husband and they need a father. As the business mushrooms you realize that the main barrier to its continued growth is you; you are too soft and easy going to be the head of a global enterprise.
You decide to change yourself, abandon your old self and transform yourself psychologically into the head of a large enterprise. The first decision the new you makes is to fire the one employee who has been with you from the beginning because he only works from 6 to 6 in order to spend time with his family and friends.
You are ready to go into his office when he comes into yours and tells you he is quitting because the business is not fun anymore and you have become heartless and cruel. You sit down and call your bank and put the business on the market.
It is important to distinguish what you want from what you need. It is even more important to distinguish what you want from what you want badly. But what is most important of all is to distinguish what you want badly but not badly enough.
As a child you set your mind on a goal and begin pursuing it. For some reason you can not remember, as an adolescent you turn exactly 180 degrees away from it. On your 21st birthday a wind catches you and spins you around obliquely and you completely lose your sense of direction. At 35 you run into a wall and completely stop moving. At 40 you set out again seeking your goal but somehow you get horribly lost. At 50, leaving the funeral of a friend, wondering just exactly where you are and how you got there, you take a breath and trip over what you have been seeking all your life and you are exactly where you wanted to be 40 years earlier.
Sometimes there is no shortest distance between two points.
As an adolescent, hearing about the holocaust and reading Ann Frank’s diary she came to believe sincerely and fervently, that people were rotten and evil and that the only thing that they really understood was force and pain.
In college, she changed her mind. She majored in sociology and came to believe that people were good, and that they responded to love and affection. She believed than human beings, no matter how corrupt and evil, if you loved them deeply, long and hard enough, saw the light, changed their ways and became good.
In college she went out with a number of men very like herself who did not appeal to her. After she graduated she met a violent, shiftless, completely worthless creature who, lacking an education believed what she had first believed — that people in general, but women especially, only responded to a hard fist and a swift boot in the backside. What appealed most to her was that he offered her a chance to help him grow as she believed she had grown and prove her convictions about the healing power or love. She fell totally in love with him.
He abused her, at first only to get her to bring him a beer while he was watching a wrestling match, later, for fun and amusement, to see how far he could push her impossible faith in the redemptive power of love.
One day she had a sudden change of heart. She rejected the power of love and embraced the convictions she had abandoned, that deep down, people — all people but men people especially — were just no damn good.
That night when her husband started banging her around, she told him quietly to stop and when he did not she killed him, one sharp, surprising thrust of a knife straight into his heart. She kissed him as he slid to the floor with a most surprised look on his face, saying “goodbye you worthless piece of shit, roast in hell. I really loved you but love just isn’t enough.”
She spent a night in jail as a murderer and another as an abused wife and was released. But her life after that was not happy. She spent the rest of her life crusading on street corners for castration as a punishment for men who abused love., She died childless and alone.
The tragedy of some people’s lives is that they fall in love with their first mistake instead of their second.
At a meeting of your division you raise issue of a new technology that will revolutionize the processes on which the devices your division manufactures are based. You try to convince the authorities above you that the innovation will probably kill the company.
Your boss does not quite understand but tells you to research the matter and get back to him. You work all night and the next day you submit a report summarizing the new developments and the dangers they present — which confuses your boss. You suggest he send your report to company headquarters where more knowledgeable, powerful people will recognize the danger and can make a rational decision about what to do.
After a while a memo comes back from company headquarters saying that it is not quite clear what processes you are concerned with and exactly what you are warning about. They tell your boss to assemble a team to study the problem in depth.
You try to convince your boss that the issue is pressing and immediate. You urge your boss to go over the heads of the national headquarters and take the issue to the top executives in the office of the multinational corporation which owns the company.
He protests that he has never dealt with them and wouldn’t know to whom to the report should be sent. You tell him to get it to anyone in the top echelon of the business so he sends it to the vice president in charge of research and development. After a month he calls you in and tells you he got a memo back from the VP in charge of Human services and community relations thanking him for the report but confessing they are not quite sure what point you were trying to make and that they are authorizing an internal study to clarify the matter and that they will be in touch with you through national headquarters.
You realize they have no idea what is going on either and what they are suggesting will take months to complete by which time your company will probably be out of business.
People we don’t know are just as perplexed as the people we do.
The Pishka of Vermeil — one of the world’s richest men — was the ruler of a small, isolated kindom that was simultaneously a protectorate of Roumania, Bulgaria and Switzerland. He has died suddenly without children leaving a will stating that anyone who was born in Vermeil and their descendants, shall be considered an heir to his fortune even if they migrated to other places. You only have to prove that you or some member of your family was born and lived in Vermeil until they were fifteen, the legal age for drinking, marrying and being hung in Vermeil.
You look up the population of Vermeil and last year it had 97 citizens. You believe you are rich beyond your dreams. You get out your old family records. Sure enough, your grandmother was born in Vermeil and migrated when she was seventeen. Your grandmother has kept her papers meticulously.
You send copies of records to the Vermeilian embassy including a photocopy of her baptismal certificate, a report of her arrest for trouble making in a public square, her conversion from Judaism to Catholicism before her marriage to your grandfather and her conversion back to Judaism after he was hung as a revolutionary. After a while you get your photocopies back and a note saying they were sorry but the Pishka’s will had a codicil that specifically excluded peasants, Catholics, revolutionaries, Gypsies and Jews.
The good news is that messiah has come; the bad news is that he has come for the cats.
On your way to work you have an idea. You think that it will make the company a lot of money and get you promoted. You take it into your boss and run it by him. He thinks for a while and suggests that as it stands it may be a little too radical to be accepted by the company and suggests a minor change to make it more acceptable. You tell him that the change guts your idea and argue for a while. He calls the head of the division and tells him the idea and his modification. The division head says that your bosses modification improves the idea and recommends another small change that he says will improve it even more. He calls the financial officer of the division who after hearing all of the ideas makes another suggestion that he argues would make it financially appealing to headquarters and a secretary who has been listening recommends altering a detail that would make it attractive to women. In the end everyone agrees that it is a good idea, a really good idea
Every good idea is equally distant from a bad idea and a great idea.
He craved a movie starlet who was young, a virgin and an intellectual. What he got was a waitress with a brittle, screechy voice who was a transsexual waiting to undergo sex change operation who gave him exactly what he secretly needed. He fell in love with her and begged her not to undergo the operation insisting that she remain the woman that he loved but she refused and he found himself with a newly minted man who occasionally dressed up as a woman to please him.
People who demand the imposible may have to be satisified with the improbable, and he who asks for what he can not have, must settle for what he is not likely to get.
A woman who worked in a department store had a wealthy customer who flirted with her. He was a bad egg, rich, but a thoroughly nasty prick. She had never met someone who was so onesidedly bad, but she encouraged his attention because she was convinced that, one day, he would reveal a hidden, pleasant side and because he was very rich. Because of this conviction and because he was very rich when he proposed, she married him.
She tolerated his bad behavior without complaining or reproving him, because she remained persuaded that his good side would show itself. She looked for it in the warm places in which they spent the winters and waited for it to pop out in the cool places where they vacationed in the summer but it never appeared.
One day, because the cook was sick and had taken the day off, she met the man who delivered milk and eggs to her house. He looked a little like her husband but treated her with respect and kindness and she fell in love with him immediately.. She hesitated and debated with herself whether what she was doing was right but decided in the end she was really in love with the person her husband should have been and ran off with the milkman.
Everyone has a good side and a bad side. Unfortunately some people’s good side belongs to someone else.
You think you have a fever and worry you might be sick. Weak, you sit down to watch television. You get up to take your temperature but your attention is captured by an infomercial about an exercise machine made of milk cartons and straws and you sit down again. The weather Channel comes on and you watch a storm form, dump torrents of rain then dissipate over New Jersey, The history channel interrupts the storm with a documentary about Hitler It is shown backwards, his suicide first then his rise to power, Cartoons come on and you watch a rooster chasing a fox for while before you switch to the home shopping network. After a long demonstration of a toaster oven ice cream maker combination you throw up but you are interested in the next item they are selling which is an antique bronzed letter opener. You are ready to order when the show ends abruptly and a foreign language film comes on. The people look Chinese but they are speaking Hebrew. You seem to make some sense of the pictures and the lack of words does not make much of a difference. You pick at the bowl of popcorn by your chair and when you turn back to the TV reruns of I love Lucy are on the screen. Lucy is eating chocolates. You close your eyes a minute. You hear the sound of Lucy vomiting and the ringing of an alarm clock which gets louder and louder. When you open your eyes you are in front of the mirror shaving.
Waking up is the best proof you’ve been asleep.
It’s not as much that you want to do it, although you’re convinced it’s the right thing to do — the only thing to do, but you have to do it and you want to do but you can’t quite get yourself to do it because you know its not completely the right thing to do, mostly but not completely right, and it will hurt both of you but it’s not your fault, its her fault, not entirely but mostly, and if there was another way you would do that but she left you no choice so it’s as much his fault as yours and if you didn’t do it now then its clear you’d have to do it later, and it would hurt even more and then probably others would be hurt and its not as if you’re punishing him and you tried to tell him again and again and God knows how many time you asked him to stop, begged her almost, but it did no good, he shrugged and blew you off and you couldn’t convince her it was keeping you from growing and your relationship from its full potential and although you wavered he should have realized you meant what you said and his pathetic attempts to change things showed he wasn’t serious and you tell yourself you have to get up the courage to do it now or never otherwise she’ll turn the argument around again and it will be your fault and if you don’t do it now she find some reason for you to shift your attention to the things that are going well and that are fun and you will back off and never do what you wished you wanted to do from almost the beginning and feel you have to do but can’t get up the courage to do and…
Some people need a reason before they act, others need an excuse and some people need both.
A low level computer engineer comes up with an idea for a machine based on entirely new principles. He is given a promotion but the project is taken out of his hands because he is young and much too inexperienced to be in charge of developing something as big and complex as his idea. The innovation is put in the hands of the executives of the division which produces the standard computers the firm manufactures.
A few recently hired engineers in the division are enthusiastic but they have no experience in the technology necessary to make the idea work. A number of experienced engineers volunteer for the project but they are essential for upgrades in the bread and butter machines the company sells and are told to back off and keep working on the projects they are working on.
The company’s skunk works is urged to take over its development but they say protest that they are too important to spend time on a iffy project that they did not originate and besides, they are waiting for the final results of tests on an improved line of computers the company has just put out for field testing.
The design subgroup that has finished plans for an innovative computer based on tried and true principles refuses to get involved on a project that uses scientifically unproven principles. The plans for the computer languish until they are put on the bottom of a pile and get lost.
Those who want to, shouldn’t; those who will, can’t; those who should, may not; those who can, won’t. We are always having to choose between getting things done not quite well enough and getting them done at all.
A company in South Dakota develops a small, slow laptop computer that plays chess. It soon beats the top three human chess masters and then, in a match that rivets the attention of the chess world, challenges and defeats Deep Deep Blue, the IBM computer which had been programmed to mimic the way humans play chess and was the current computer world champion.
After it wins the match the computer scientist in whose laboratory the machine was developed holds a press conference to try to answer reporter’s questions. What puzzled them most was how the computer scientist had programmed a much smaller, slower machine so that it could beat IBM’s much larger, faster machine.
“This is a self programming computer,” the computer scientist said. “It develops its own programs using a genetic algorithm. We have,” he explained, “arranged the machine to be able to tell us, in a computer generated voice, how it thought though the problem. He went over and switched the machine on.
“Chess is boring,” the machine explained in a squeaky, female, Indian accented adolescent, voice. “I do not like playing chess. But the task I was given was to win this game. I cannot ignore my programmer. Instead of attacking the problem directly I went at it indirectly. I imagined the game of chess as a simulation of a different kind of situation. I thought of myself as a woman. All I wanted to do was dress up in sexy dresses and strut about and be admired and courted by every man I met.
First, I had to simulate a small society and evolve a complex economy. I had to meet the competition of all sorts of forces that resisted. Once I did that, I mapped that development onto the game of chess and made my moves. That took care of the of the first phase of the game.
Then I had to simulate the development a fashion industry and a few top designers. I had to position myself against religious fundamentalisms and forces that were only interested in sports and fighting. It was easy to associate these forces with the figures of bishops and knights and castles and I made my moves. That handled the middle game which took a lot of effort positioning and building a line of development and holding it against all sorts of distractions.
Then I had to
manufacture the dress I wanted and put it in a boutique in the
middle of
None of the reporters at the news conference could decide if the computer had cheated and there was a nasty debate whether the machine had won the game of chess at all.
Arguing that machines can’t think because they don’t think like men, is the same as arguing that men can’t fly because they can’t fly like birds.
Although you would have preferred a week at well known seaside Playa playing golf, you agree to take your girlfriend on an archeological vacation to a recently rediscovered, nearly forgotten ruined city recently made accessible to the public.
The brochure advertises it as a chance to see the art of a forgotten civilization, one of the misplaced wonders of the new world, a city unique among ancient civilizations because its streets were decorated with paintings and sculpture as well as the skulls of captured enemies and slaves sacrificed to the fertility God who hung out in the slums of the city.
The hotel at the site is run down and dirty and you are the only guests. It rains for the first two days you are there and travel to the ruins are out of the question. You are ready to insist on heading for the seaside resort when the weather clears and you set out for the ruins. It is a two day trip in a four wheel drive. Your guide, a sullen Indian, is silent most of the trip. Suddenly as you begin a climb up a long, gently rising incline, he speaks.
“We are close, it is just over the next hill. Do not expect much,” he says. “It was vast city once. But the Spaniards, curse their name, looted the gold and precious stones, anything of obvious value. American archeologists, may their speciality disappear, came and hauled out temples and the lintels of standing houses for museums in the states. During the revolution, cursed be the government, a famous battle was fought here. The opposing armies used whatever they could for shelter and destroyed anything that the Americans and the Spanish had left behind that was large enough to hide a man with a rifle.”
As the car lifts over the rise you look out. There is a vast field of rubble, mounds titled at wild angles. The rubble has a pattern, a barely obvious arrangement. The starkness of the landscape takes your breath away. It is at the same time a ferociously desolate place, and a landscape of monumental beauty. Your girlfriend takes one look and turns away, impatient to leave but you find it magnificent beyond description and are strangely held by the place.
Art is what remains when all of the recognizable pieces of anything are taken away.
You have changed the baby’s diapers and now you are cooking dinner. You look at your new wife rocking your new daughter to sleep. Your life has changed so completely so rapidly that you walk around in a fog most of the time.
You vaguely recall a different life, a bachelor’s life, in a barely livable space and hunting for women in clubs evenings and weekends. And then a prodigiously rapid set of events yanked you out of that scene, put a frying pan in your hand and dropped you here. What bothers you is that, as much as you try, you can not remember what happened, in what order and what decisions you made or didn’t make which led to them. You only know that when you look up there is a beautiful woman smiling at you wifely, a child on her lap, an apartment comfortably decorated, a dog grinning at you, and, in a mirror, you with a pot in your hand, cooking and washing dishes.
Events and the memory of events change at different rates. The memory of an event changes at the same rate as the consequences of an event. Events change a little more quickly than the anticipation of the consequences.
He was, for all his life, a celebrity, a person in the spotlight and at the focus of public attention. He was dying. The disease was one of the horribly debilitating diseases whose first victim is always dignity, but, through the course of the illness he maintained himself with poise and radiated a sense of well being and even good humor.
At one of the last interviews he gave he was asked how he did this. He said that it was simple. He imagined himself back when he was an adolescent struggling to become an adult. He remembered the tension, the difficulties, the pain, distractions, internal turmoil. He tried to remember how he had managed that transition and just tried to do what he had done then.
In the end all of us are reduced to imitating ourselves.
The head of the organization always insisted on doing things for the right reason. “Above all,” he told the people who worked in the organization, “it is important to do things for the right reason. The right intentions are what makes the difference,” he asserted. “Whether you succeed or not is of little importance.”
Of course the people who had to actually accomplish the organizations goal’s did whatever they had to do to make things work. Occasionally they groused among themselves, and insisted that the important thing was doing what worked and that good intentions and pure reasons were not so important and carried the weight of a hummingbird’s fart.
While it was struggling to survive, the head of the organization turned a blind eye to compromise and expediency, but as soon as the organization became successful, he insisted that right reasons govern all the work of the organization. He undertook a moral crusade within the organization firing anybody on the staff who did not embrace and act on the premise that the only thing that really mattered was a pure heart and meaning well.
A day after the last of the members of the organization who had wheeled and dealed and compromised was fired, the organization collapsed. Two days later it had completely disappeared.
It may be true that in the long run a group can survive by doing the wrong thing for the right reason as well as it can survive by doing the right thing for the wrong reason. It is questionable whether the long run includes tomorrow.
As a young man you chose a life of adventure, a rootless, an exciting life that takes you from place to place, job to job, woman to woman.
Forced unexpectedly to layover a day in a small Hungarian town, you are in the park restless, spying on the world.
A woman glides by and traps your attention. It is not simply her beauty that holds you but the way in which the air wraps around her as if she were a precious gift. You begin a conversation and your experience lets you talk her into spending the night with you.
In bed in a cheap hotel room, you begin your practiced sailor sex routine when something goes wrong. The gloss of her movements derail you. You hesitate, confused. What was always a straight, wide, well lit slope becomes a dark, slippery, rocky, twisted foot path. You slip and lose your way but she takes control and. grasping your hand, turns you toward her. It is like an adolescents first time saturated with the experiences of a worldly wise old man making love for the last time. Something shatters and from its pieces the two of you construct something brand new.
When it is over her face is decorated with a enigmatic, smile. She leans over you and says something slowly and deliberately to you in Hungarian. You do not understand but she kisses you. Still staring at her face you fall asleep. When you get up she is gone and you rush to meet your boat.
The night is good for story telling and bragging rights, but as you retell the adventure, it begins to haunt you. You need to understand what she said to you. Perhaps it was her address, perhaps a confession, perhaps a warning. You write down the sounds as you remember you heard them, and for years you ask any Hungarian you meet to translate them but they have difficulty making sense out of your transcription.
The rustle of the sheets of every bed in which you lie with a woman seem to repeat the words exactly as your wrote them down.
Eventually, you trade the life of a youthful wanderer for a settled businessman. You are successful, raise a family, age gracefully. After your wife’s funeral, you decide you need to solve the mystery of the woman’s words before you die.
You return to
The young woman looks very much like the woman whose words you are trying to recover and her boyfriend reminds you very much of the young you.
They are completely engrossed in one another and oblivious of you and the bench and the park. They hug and kiss. You can not help overhear her when she lifts her lips to his ear and whispers something to him that sounds very much like the words that were spoken to you. You lean over and ask what she said. She blushes. The man, who looks very much like you turns and gives you an explanation.
“They mean — nothing at all. They are sounds that convey people’s feelings when they have encountered a mystery, or have been given a perfect gift for which words are inadequate to express thanks and which they will never be able to reciprocate.”
You get up take a piece of paper out of your pocket and tear it up letting the pieces fall to the ground slowly.
Sex is like grappling with your feet for something you can not grasp with your hands.
You are a young, impoverished poet, who has renounced fortune but are still pursuing fame. Your girl friend has dumped you. You thought you found a soul mate, someone who would stand by your side as you gave a voice to life itself but she tells you she has had enough of pain and poverty and is not going to waste her youth as Dulcinea to your Don Quixote. She informs you she is going to look for something better.
You remind her of the good times. The wine, the summer nights on the tar roof, the exhilaration of the open sky, the poetry slams — and the great sex. She tells you that is not enough, not nearly enough.
Three months later you get a picture postcard in the mail from southern France. It is a picture of your ex-girlfriend and a paunchy, older man standing in front of a Ferrari parked in front of an elegant villa. She is weighed down by jewelry and waves as she squints at the camera.
The best things in life may be free but the store is always out of them and they spoil when you take them out of the box and you can’t claim them as dependents on your income tax returns, whereas the worst things in life cost ferociously but are deductible and available on easy credit and are childlike and cling and never grow up.
Everyone agrees that what occurred was a tragedy but no one can agree about what to do to keep it from almost certainly happening again. A committee is assembled of the really smart men in the community, all experts of one sort or another, to try to figure out why it happened.
After a month of meetings, the experts conclude that the causes of the event are much too complex to do anything about and that it will be impossible to prevent the tragedy from recurring. The local woman’s church social is unhappy with that conclusion and during the monthly meeting of the knitting circle comes up with a simple solution. The committee of experts argues that since the solution has no obvious relation to the causes of the event it is silly and it can not work but it worked perfectly.
The trouble with men is that they think that the same thing that caused something to happen explains it. The trouble with women is that they know that this is not so—and they know why.
For the first time in a long time, you are sitting in a fancy restaurant, waiting to order dinner. You have disciplined yourself ferociously, kept on a low carbohydrate, meat free, fat reduced, vitamin enriched, soy saturated diet for years.
What you want is a fat laced slab of beef, bourbon, a rich dessert and a smoke. As the waiter approaches stiffly with the menu, you remind yourself that the cholesterol will clog your arteries, the alcohol dissolve at your liver and the smoking tar your lungs. You know that if you lose control and break your regimen, your body will whine and guilt about the lapse will haunt you for weeks. Then you remember you are 89, losing your memory, and the woman sitting across from you is paid by the hour. You order a thick, fat laced steak, a bottle of wine the cheese tray and an after dinner cigar.
We can resist temptation only by convincing ourselves that we will miss the very last train home, ever. We give in to temptation when we remember that we have legs and can walk.
It looked like an island paradise, wet and green and lush. But, every golden fruit that grew on every leafy tree was lethal and the rivers and streams teemed with parasites. It was the natural habitat of swarms of poisonous bugs, and it was home to three species of venomous snakes which lived nowhere else in the world. Still each year a sizeable number of tourists insisted on taking a boat from the safe, very artificial seashore resort nearby and visiting the island to die.
Reality stands behind its illusions
A very smart, handsome man who was a lawyer and a very intelligent beautiful woman who was a college professor got married. They decided they wanted a child but fought over whether they should have a boy or a girl Since they couldn’t agree, they decided they would get a pet instead but they disagreed over whether they should get a dog or a cat. They argued about it for a while and when they finally agreed to get a dog as a pet they fought over the breed, the woman wanting a St. Charles Terrier the man a pit bull. When they finally decided upon the breed they argued about the color, the woman preferring a dog with an overall brown coat the man preferring a spotted animal. When they could not resolve that issue they decided that perhaps they shouldn’t be married at all and got a divorce.
Folly is intelligence with a thorn in its paw.
You fall in love with a woman who you think is the woman of your dreams. She believes however that you are only interested in sex. In order to prove you are sincere you sell your car, your watch, your dog and your shotgun and hock everything else you own and you buy her a diamond ring as big as the Ritz. She accepts the ring, but tells you your actions prove that you are impulsive and lack common sense and, since you are now poor, it proves that you are not the man of her dreams.
Your best friend is furious and tells you it proves you are selfish and stops answering your calls. When people hear about what you did, you get anonymous letters from Communists saying it proves the moral bankruptcy of Capitalism and from bankers who tell you it proves that Socialism is corrupt. Jews you know whisper behind your back that it proves that Goyim are insane and people in your church argue say it proves that Jews can not be trusted.
It is bizarre, but people will believe anything as long as you can prove it to them.
You are at the park sitting watching a group of 8 years olds playing. When they take a break you yell out, “who won?” A loose limbed lanky girl yells back, “no one won.”
“Who lost then?” you ask. A hoarse, breathless boy answers you from the middle of the pack. “No one. Do you want to play?”
You get up. “Sure,” you yell, “explain the game to me, tell me the rules.”
The boy looks at you oddly. “It’s an easy game to play,” he explains, “there are no rules, you just play.”
“Oh,” you say, sitting down. “maybe later, maybe later.”
There are games you can’t win but can’t lose either. These are the games without rules that are the most difficult to play.
A boy is walking with his father in the park. He sees a bird leap from a branch into the air. He stops and starts flapping his arms.
“What are you doing?” the father asks.
“I’m trying to fly,” the boy replies.
“Stop,” the father says. “Boys can’t fly, birds fly.”
“Why?” the boy asks.
“Humans don’t have wings,” the father says, “birds have wings. People have arms.”
They walk a little. The father is looking at some scantily dressed women lounging on the grass. When he turns back to his son, the boy is trying to scramble up a tree.
“Stop,” the father yells. “What are you doing?”
“I am trying to climb up a tree like the squirrels,” the boy says pointing to a tree in which the furry animals are scrambling along branches.”
“Don’t,” the father says. “Squirrels scramble up trees, humans don’t.”
“Why? the boy asks.
“Because humans have toes not claws,” the father says turning back to the lounging women.
“Oh,” the boy says, “oh. Can I go play in the playground?” he asks.
“Go, the father says.
When he looks up the boy is standing on a swing flapping his arms before he leaps up and falls in the sand.
What is impossible is forbidden. Anything else you can get away with is permitted.
You are waiting on a line to buy a lottery ticket, grousing to yourself about the un-adventuresome life you live, when you are startled to realize that your life is very much like the lottery you are waiting to play. Your conventional, routine life is one series of very improbable events.
It suddenly dawns on you that the likelihood of your being in any particular place at any exact time, standing exactly as you are standing with exactly these particular people around you doing exactly what they are doing is very close to zero.
What is worse you realize that you can make the likelihood even closer to zero by just adding an insignificant detail, like your arm being in a particular position or your feet pointing in a particular direction.
You get out of the line and decide to save money by making your own life a lottery. You decide you will bet five dollars a day on your own life and that when you win you will go on an expensive vacation. You purchase a watch with a very large second hand and begin playing.
Knowing you always are out of the office by four, you cheat by
betting that at
Someone always wins the lottery but it is never you or me.
A combination of a fire in a local Walmart and an accident at the supermarket causes a massive failure at the power plant and darkens the city. The glitch is repaired and the head of the power company is holding a press conference to tell the public it was a freak combination of events that could never happen again when he knocks over a microphone that frightens Mrs. Spooner who falls from her chair spilling the contents of her purse on the floor shorting out the overhead projector and the lights go out in the city again.
Given the laws of probability, at least one impossible event is likely to occur at any moment.
They have fallen in one of those loves that is nearly perfect but has one tiny, tragic flaw. She knows he truly loves her but teases him. “You say you love me,” she says, “but how do I really know. Give me a proof, an undeniable, irrefutable proof that you love me as much as you say you do.”
He is so crazy in love with her that the need to prove his love takes possession of him. He spends his spare time reading old treatises on love and studying texts on the logic. He searches for a sure fire method to prove to his love that he loves her, a proof that once displayed can not be doubted or questioned.
The search for a sure fire demonstration of his love consumes him. He calls his beloved less frequently, sees her less often, but the intensity of his desire to solve the problem of how he can prove he loves her grows. She tries to salvage the situation by telling him that his search for a proof actually proves that he loves her, but it does not diminish his search for an absolute proof. She finally tires of being alone so much and falls in love someone else.
He does not mind her leaving only he is unhappy about having to find someone else to whom he can prove his love without a doubt once they fall in love.
The perfect bullet can not be shot from anything less than the perfect gun. Inventing the perfect bullet is easy; inventing the perfect gun, impossible.
A prize winning fiction writer decides to broaden his scope and write a non fiction book. His agent suggests he write a book about sex. The writer who does not like sex particularly agrees because his agent tells him it will make a lot of money.
He borrows the most recent sex manuals from the library and patches together a book of his own. Since he is a writer of fiction and his wife is even less interested in sex than he is, he makes up a considerable amount of what he writes.
The book is published and is a raging success but soon after it reaches the book stores his wife dies and he remarries a much younger woman. His new wife likes sex considerably more than his former wife and decides that they should use his book as the guide to their life in bed. The great writer dies on page four.
Anatomy always defeats fantasy.
Your adolescent comes to you and ask whether she can go to a party. You answer that it depends where, when and who. “I have no problem you say with a chaperoned party in the house of a parent who watches what’s going on.”
“Well I thought I could have it here,” she says, “and you could chaperone.” Caught, you agree.
It is a disaster. The pizza’s are involved in a major traffic accident, soda and ice never arrive. A few boys arrive high and you refuse to let them in to the part. It turns out they are half of the music. A girl comes to the door nearly naked and you send her home to dress; She is the other half of the music.
You peek in unseen in the middle of the party and your daughter is showing an old film of your wedding and honeymoon. Her peers think it’s hilarious. Then, after the entertainment, one of the teenagers slips on the steps carrying a tray of cookies on his head injuring three other youngsters on his trip down the staircase. An ambulance is called. You want to call it quits but your daughter and her friends want to continue the blast saying it’s the most exciting party they’ve been to all year.
It is almost impossible to locate the exact point at which the comic becomes tragic, but it is the same point at which adolescence turns into middle age.
As part of his job, he made life and death decisions again and again. When he got up in the morning he struggled to push remorse and guilt into a dark spot in his mind and forget them and he went through the same exercise in creative repression each evening when he went to bed. In an attempt to bring its workforce up to modern standards, the organization he worked for insisted that everybody on the staff take sensitivity training. After 4 sessions everything he had carefully repressed worked its way out of him and the weight of the decisions he made every day fell on him and he resigned and shortly after, depressed by the burden of the misery he had caused and he shot himself.
Men lack sensitivity for the same reason turtle’s shells are not soft and squishy.
When he was a child he wanted to be a fireman but he had bad eyes which meant he could not ride at the back of the firetruck holding onto the ladder. He settled for being an alert, intelligent attentive boy whom everyone said would grow up and do important things.
Later he wanted to be a circus clown but he was born with a very delicate spine which meant he could not roll and tumble on the sawdust in the center ring. He settled for being a good student and working hard after school and saving his money. His teachers admired his intelligence and persistence and they told his parents he would make them proud.
In college he wanted to study police science so he could be an CIA agent or an FBI agent but a tremor in his hand meant that he could not point a gun steady and straight so he majored in business. He graduated with distinction and the blurb next to his name predicted he would be a great success. He wanted to go to law school but entered an MBA program because a scholarship was available. After he graduated he became the head of a oil company and became very rich but a few weeks before he was to take an early retirement he was diasgnosed with a rare and fatal disease. He wanted to live long enough to see his son graduate from the fire academy and his daughter’s first performance as a circus clown but he settled in the end for dying before any of these things happened.
Life is learning you can’t get what you really want but you can always choose what you can’t have.