I decided I’d better write something for this blog site tonight, seeing how I’ve amassed a grand total of one post for the month of January thus far. The problem is I can’t think of anything to write about at the moment. The baby’s sleeping for the night, so I figured I would seize the downtime to compose a permanently mind-altering missive for the teeming throngs of nobody who hang on this site’s every profundity. Nothing of substance is drooling from my keyboard at the moment, but that doesn’t matter since this screen full of white space is growling, “Feed me, Seymour!” How my MacBook took on the voice of Audrey II in my mind just then, I’ll never know. Nor will I ever want to know.
I know what I’ll write about — a subject so meaningful that any consideration of it will forever change the life of any lucky individual that partakes of it: the wall sitting in front of me.
The wall is made of drywall, which is a surprisingly flimsy material before it’s hung, if you’ve ever had to move sheets of it from place to place. It is hung on studs, probably consisting of 2×4 spruce lumber, to form the wall in front of my desk.
The wall is painted in flat grayish-blue paint. The previous owners of this house painted everything in various flat colors, probably to hide some of the imperfections in the drywall. We quite dislike flat paint, but frankly we’re too lazy to change it throughout the house. If I stare very carefully at the wall with the light shining behind me at just the right angle, little shimmery flecks begin to appear in it in far-flung spots, as if some impish robotic paint artisan decided to sprinkle a little glitter into the can at the factory just to mess with extremely bored people’s heads. Or, perhaps the paint can itself that holds the extra flat gray is slowly disintegrating this very moment in the basement. As the can dissolves quark by quark into the paint it holds, the paint adds shiny flecks of can to its palette.
I wonder what the half-life of the average paint can could be. Would it ever decay at all on an atomic level, or would it do so over a period of several billion years? Maybe the chemicals in the paint are slowly turning the can into some kind of nuclear-powered Godzilla-like creature, bent on revenge for making it sit in a chilly basement for years on end. One day it will say to itself, “Self, thanks to nuclear decomposition, I’m radiating my own heat now. Radon got nothing on me!” The next thing you know, it will form some thuggish street gang with the other paint cans and have a rumble with the cat litter boxes under the basement staircase. “The Radiological Paint Cans of Mass Destruction,” they’ll call themselves, and before long they’ll start marauding through town and shaking down kids for tokens at Chuck-E-Cheese.
Once they’ve cornered the Chuck-E-Cheese token racket, the cans will use the tokens to purchase the entire planet’s Pog supply, thereby sending the global economy into a tailspin unless all the countries of the world render them an annual tribute of three goats and a fake mustache.
I’m going down to the basement to check on the paint cans now, because I wouldn’t want anything bad happening to those poor goats. Won’t somebody please think of the goats?!
A Tale Told by an Idiot 