After years of wheedling, I still don’t have my own backhoe, so I can’t bury my time capsule. Besides, I want it opened in 6 weeks, not 6 millenia. So maybe I should just put the “materials” in a Mason Jar on the kitchen counter where everything else gets so efficiently lost in the sands of time. Attached by rubber band to the Mason jar will be a cute little ball peen hammer. Who wouldn’t want to break glass in case of emergency?
Yes, the capsule is intended to bring the person of the future back from the brink. The future being the next time Mercury is in retrograde or someone has a hangnail. The capsule contains a letter, written on acid-free paper in non-fading ink, possibly blood. The text is as follows:
If you’re reading this letter, you’ve lost your mind enough to break a Mason jar with a ball been hammer. Don’t bother to deny it. You’ve realized – very recently and all of a sudden – that you’ve squandered your youth and there’s nothing left to do but grow old and work at Home Depot part-time, if they’ll have you, which they certainly should, considering that plenty of other know-nothings work there, in the plumbing department, and all you have to do when “helping” a customer is pretend you work for a communist government, shrug, and say “no es posible,” or something equivalent in Russian. Furthermore, scrutinizing your husband’s habit of putting half-yogurts back in the fridge has brought you to the conclusion that your marriage is over. You are ALL ALONE, but that is the human condition, is it not? You feel almost as sorry for mankind as you do for yourself, but not quite.
Follow these steps immediately:
1. Eat one pint of ice cream, full fat, no sorbet.
2. Read 25 pages of anything by S.J. Perelman.
3. Wander sadly into the yard and become distracted by a piece of PVC pipe that bends.
4. Delete all your emails without reading them.
5. Call friend to say you’re “in crisis.”
6. Enlist friend to participate in role-play. Friend plays The Vengeful Universe and you play you. Run improv dialog until you fall down laughing your ass off. This can take up to three minutes.
8. Go home and beg your family not to hold you responsible for anything you said during the past week. Quickly change the subject by producing pizza.
9. You’re hungry, despite the ice cream. Go ahead. Eat.
10. Wait! The blessing! Baruch atah adonai, etc.
Welcome home.
7 Comments
Don’t be depressed. You must ski and ride your bike more often. My Die Young book – critically admired has gone nowhere so I just ski some more.
This isn’t my real name. I’ve just heard it’s not possible to leave a comment on this site and I’m checking to see if it’s true.
Bring me a mason jar and a sense of humor and a hammer and all will be right with the world…
I wanna play! You be the Vengeful Universe, and I’ll be… no wait, I’ll be the Vengeful Universe, and you be… no wait, that doesn’t work either. Maybe we need an Unsuspecting Third Party to play the Vengeful Universe?
Dayenu.
Let’s role play tonight on the veranda, whilst drinking wine and looking out over the city
This is boring. Being a writer isn’t interesting. It’s what writers write about that can be interesting, and this isn’t. My life is way too fun and busy to read something that bores me. Write something that makes people think, or laugh, or cry, or sparks a discussion, or does something, not the painful minutia of a stalled life. Look at these responses from readers. Only four, and one just wanted to see if she could leave one. One telling you to ride your bike. Two saying they’d play on the porch. That’s awful. Write something that engages them, from something that engages you. There’s so much out there.
Debby Malcolm, I am taking your advice. From now on I am going to write cheerful informative things and shut up about myself. I have just taken a job writing copy for the Vermont Country Store, so this should be easy. Stay tuned for breaking news about union suits, and thanks for your encouraging words.
PS Ignatz Horible is me. I just put that in to make it look like someone was reading me. But hey, someone already was! You!
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