a true story

Locking his friend in the rabbit cage seemed like such a good idea at the time because it would provide them a certain degree of realism and drama as they pretended to be superheroes. He pretended to be Superman and his friend was going to be Batman. The rabbit cage may just have been an old empty rabbit cage but in his imagination it was much more. The fact that his friend could actually fit inside the cage and that he could lock his friend in there from the outside elevated their imaginary play to something more real than it had ever been before. It was as if they were a little closer to actually being Batman and Superman. The rabbit cage, however, wasn’t entirely empty. It was just mostly empty with a small beehive taking up a fraction of space. He could have seen the bees as a problem but the realism the cage provided far outweighed in his mind any potential risk the bees might have presented. It was too perfect to pass up and he imagined that if his friend kept still and didn’t bother the bees that the bees wouldn’t have any reason to bother him. His friend did suggest that the bees might pose a more significant risk than he was appreciating at the time so they reasoned with each other each discussing the matter from each of their perspectives but he couldn’t accept allowing the bees to ruin the potential offered by the cage especially when it seemed that neither of them could know for sure that the bees would actually sting his friend. It also seemed to him that it would have been very unreasonable of the bees to sting his friend if his friend would stay still and not bother them. Eventually his friend relented and got in the cage. He closed the caged and even locked it to prevent any escape as a supervillain would have really done.  The plan was that once he imprisoned his friend, he would pretend to fly around the house one time and then return to free his captive superhero friend. It all made so much sense to him. His friend wouldn’t be in there long, the bees would have no reason to bother his friend since his friend wouldn’t bother them and it would be as if his friend really had been a superhero that had really been captured by a supervillain and that he would actually save and help escape. Once the latch was turned, he began to run around the house, pretending to fly by outstretching his arms in front of him.  As he ran, his heart beat from the excitement caused by all the elements coming together to complete what he had envisioned. It was so perfect to him except for a certain uneasiness that began to creep into his heart. He ran faster at the urging of his uneasiness and when he finally returned, his friend was crying. He had been stung by the bees. Neither of them were sure how many times he had been stung but just one would have been enough for him to regret ever having even wanted to convince his friend to get into that old rabbit cage. It had seemed like such a good idea to begin with but in actuality, it was not.

follow your heart

something went wrong

Their confidence in him had always surpassed any confidence he had in himself. People had told him on a few occasions that he would be good at whatever he did and to not worry about the future. He hoped they were right and found a lot of comfort in what they said but he never found what they said to be true. Had they all been wrong? Did they just extrapolate what they saw in a nice likable person beyond the usefulness of likability?  Maybe in the end they just saw what they wanted because they liked him so much and they didn’t recognize the false positive their affections generated. Later in life he wondered what they had all seen in him and wondered why ultimately not everyone saw it because if everyone had seen it, he would have had different opportunities and his life wouldn’t have turned out the way it did. Things would have been different and maybe he would have accomplished whatever it might have been that would have provided that elusive sense of satisfaction he had hoped to achieve. Maybe they were right but something somewhere along the way went wrong. Maybe he went wrong somewhere and he wondered what he might have done wrong. Among the realm of so many decisions where there was no wrong or right about them, maybe there were still right or wrong decisions. He thought maybe beyond the universal truths of everyone’s existence there’s a right or wrong in the kingdom of self.  And maybe he just chose wrong exiling himself, causing himself to be banished from the wealth and treasure of his own kingdom forever leaving him with a longing to return to where he felt at home and complete.

the future

They told him that the new nature interface system was the most advanced nature interface system that had ever been developed in the history of the future but that didn’t really console him in the way the men in the lab coats had intended with their nearly falsetto voice inflections.  What he really wanted was to actually interface with nature on his own without some invented system.  He told them what he wanted and they looked at him as if he was a naive little boy that didn’t know any better and could not appreciate all the advances that the future had to offer. He was a little boy of only 7 years of age but he knew what he wanted even though he couldn’t really explain what it was or why he wanted it. They continued to encourage him to accept what they were saying and they tried just as hard to convince themselves that they were as convincing as they hoped to be with the boy even though that just a particle of doubt made it very apparent to them that they really weren’t that convincing. They chose to disregard the particle and tried even harder to make the premise of their convincing true by talking more and more and pitching their voices higher and higher until they thought that they must be convincing the boy and themselves of what they wanted to convince him of. The boy had stopped listening to what they were saying a long time ago and was only listening to how high their voices had become and watched how exaggerated their expressions and movements were as they talked to him.  Unfortunately, the little boy didn’t have any choice in the matter and his disembodied head was eventually placed inside the nature interface system interfacing with the collection of nerve endings bundled at the base of his brain sending information to his brain that would approximate nearly realistic sensory perceptions of the world. His brain began to flood with new information that hadn’t previously been available to him waking the dormant parts of his brain as they interpreted the data into sensory experiences. He was so overwhelmed by these new experiences that the men in the lab coats began to fade from his consciousness and all that remained within him of their existence was some particle of a notion of something about something that really wasn’t that convincing but he couldn’t really articulate what it was. Meanwhile, the men in lab coats moved on to the next disembodied head nearly convinced that this time they would completely convince the next person that the nature interface system was the best nature interface system that the future had ever made but not quite realizing that the discontent they were trying to dispel in so many people had so little to do with the system itself and mostly to do with their own discontent of the future. They further didn’t fully realize that they were trying to convince themselves that they were convincing about the nature interface system so that they could also convince themselves that they didn’t actually feel the same discontent that everyone else felt about future.

stickman with baggage

the pudding of life

why bother?