I am dying of the influenza. It is victimizing my fluids and bursting me from the inside out like a million chupacabras eating their way through a ham.
You finally get yourself unemployed so that you can focus on making yourself unstoppably awesome, and Nature gets wind of it, objects because it's everybody's dream to become unstoppably awesome, and then tries to murder you.
I'm showing Nature a thing or two in response. Actually just a thing. I added the "or two" because I've been programmed to always pair "a thing" with "or two" in this context. My deprogramming begins now. It should last at least as long as this sentence.
What I did to smack Nature in the face with my glove of revolution was to leave my new, temporary home. I walked outside with the influenza still attacking my organs, and then I kept walking, each step a courageous move in the war against Nature.
I oriented my face toward my nearest preferred cafe. Combined with the forward motion, this pairing of activities allowed me to walk to the cafe with little error.
Along the way, I saw a cat, and I smiled at it. It only stared back at me. I don't think cats really know what's going on.
After the cat, I stepped on some mushy, spiny things that probably would have smelled bad if I had gotten on my hands and knees to take a whiff. But, again, I outsmarted Nature; this time by resisting the urge to sample the complimentary stink.
The decomposing spiny things were the shells, or cases, or whatever you call them for horse chestnuts.
Although I've been without job for a little over two weeks, I haven't adjusted. I wake up each evening thinking that I need to get to work. I feel like a truant. I felt this way during the final months I was employed, though it was because of that nervous breakdown thing that we aren't going to talk about because I'm moving on in life. The main difference, I think, between the AWOLaphobia I feel now and the AWOLaphobia I felt then is that I was still collecting a paycheck back then. I plan to take the book world the way Genghis Khan took everything, but in the meantime I'd feel better if I had a steady income that I don't deserve.
My thoughts turned to the horse chestnuts and my childhood.
My sister and I were constantly scheming to provide ourselves with early retirement. I think we hit our peak around eleven and twelve years old. After that the schemes ended because my sister turned out to be an excellent thief, but the instinct to scheme remained.
Today I was thinking about our least successful scheme. It was all manual labor and no payoff. We were confident in our business plan, but, I've gotta say, we didn't do our homework. We looked around for things we could borrow from home or our neighbors and then sell, but unless we planned to get wealthy from selling a bucket or a pond or someone's garden, we were in need of superior merchandise.
When we stopped looking to liberate various imprisoned goods from around the neighborhood, we looked down and saw gold.
Green, brown, spiny, lovely gold.
There were more horse chestnuts on our street than there was street. They formed a spiny layer of necrotic vegetation about four feet high. Nobody had ever even seen the street; its existence was theorized based on the knowledge that most of Earth is covered by streets (not ocean as some "scientists" assert). Our vein of gold had erupted from the gold tree, and we saw cash money everywhere.
Who wouldn't want a dozen of these?
We ran back home and grabbed four thirty-gallon garbage bags. Step one was to fill the garbage bags with horse chestnuts. This part of the plan was infallible. We could do no wrong where filling bags with horse chestnuts was concerned. Tally up one success for The Horse Chestnut Company.
Our next step was to decide on a fair value for our horse chestnuts. Given that there wasn't a market for horse chestnuts in our neighborhood, we did our best to assess the value of a horse chestnut, and arrived at the price of a dozen for five dollars. We had already done the hard work. If you think about it, having somebody else go to the street, bend over, pick horse chestnuts off the ground, and put them in a bag for you is worth every penny of five dollars on the dozen. This was practically charity.
Having decided on a price, we made stylish signs with black felt pens on bent cardboard. We were children, and we knew we could win a few hearts with that rough-around-the-edges aesthetic. It was very Lucy van Pelt The-Doctor-is-In.
Finally, we marched our horse chestnuts down our street to the nearest busy intersection where it would be dangerous for a car to stop, and then we put our goods down, took our signs in hand, and began to wave them at any passing vehicle.
On your way home from work but don't want to stop at the store to get your horse chestnuts? The Doctor is In. Five bucks.
An hour later, we hadn't received any inquiries after our horse chestnuts. Nothing. Not even a Greek addicted to bartering. If there's a victory that any haggle-warrior must enjoy at least once, it's schooling two children out of a dozen horse chestnuts for less than the going rate.
Another hour passed, and our first customer pulled over. She didn't buy anything. Her purpose was to compliment our inventory.
"Those things are poisonous," she said.
It was a blow to morale. We responded by discounting our horse chestnuts. Given their status as "poisonous," it's only fair that a dozen should go for two-fifty. Times were tougher in the horse chestnut industry than we expected. If we had to slash prices again, then it wouldn't even have been worth our time. Suddenly, trying to sell someone's tree or their garden gnomes sounded like a good idea.
At the end of the day, we put our signs down. We did everything we could, but the intersection of Nebraska and 30th wasn't ready for horse chestnuts. A pleasure in the rest of the world where they can be used to play games or make acetone, the ignorant masses had passed right by at thirty-five miles per hour, traveling toward and then away from the greatest opportunity life would ever throw their way, like a dirty iceball sprinkled with lemon juice lined razors aimed at the crotch.
Plus, the biggest problem, what in the hell were we supposed to do with all those horse chestnuts?