2002-09-10 - ?:?? ??

Once upon a time, there was a man who lived in a wooden shoe. He was quite happy with this, but one day realized that he actually was not. "Hey," he said to himself and the shoe, "Why am I living in a freaking shoe? This is not what I have always dreamt of." For, you see, this man had always wanted, from a very young age, to grow up and make a living selling balloons and then hitting them with darts so he could sell even more. He reasoned that this would provide just enough money for him to live inside a small coo-coo clock -- nothing fancy, you know, just a small wooden one with a rusting yellow bird, which he would name Vanessa. He had dreamed of this life all through his life, until he began living in the wooden shoe and selling pancakes to the local clowns and pigs. I guess this man had become so content with his life that he had forgotten his earlier image of what being content was, and he (wanting more, just as everyone does) decided to move out of that wooden shoe and into the coo-coo clock of his dreams. Sure, it was not wooden but rubber, and maybe the bird was really a shattered gnome fellow by the name of Yo-hav, but (he convinced himself) this is what he had always dreamed of. That night, a terrible storm began brewing like a bad cup of tea in the belly of the sky, and the man sat with the gnome and talked about balloons and pancakes and wooden shoes. The storm was a terrible one, so bad that it caused his old wooden shoe to blow away and crumble into chocolate chips. He felt sad by this because, at that precise moment, he realized that he had been content before in the wooden shoe. The shoe was life, and the coo-coo clock was just some terrible dream, coming at him like an unsure memory or waves of nausea from previous sicknesses. He longed for his real life but knew that if he had stayed with it he would now be the biggest chocolate chip of them all amoung so much rubble. This man now knew that he was doomed and thought that perhaps he would be better off as a chocolate chip debris and wished only for death. As an answer to this or maybe just because, a lightning bolt stabbed out of the clouds and licked the coo-coo clock with its electric wrath. The electric current flowed through the rubber of his house but caused no harm except for resetting Yo-hav's digital watch back a few hours and causing him to miss a documentary about penguins and their involvment in the Vietnam War. The man would have wished for life in the wooden shoe but been brought death, and now, inside the walls of a very sad coo-coo clock, the man was wishing for death. The lightning bolt coursed through the walls and then was gone, preserving the coo-coo clock like an old wish.