Home Depot was a madhouse that morning. They were having one of those ill-advised door-buster sales and people were running amok like looters in a riot, wild-eyed, with bags of grass seed slung over their shoulders and carts piled Dr. Seuss-like with flats of pansies and marigolds. I was there for the Tree-of-Life sapling special, culled off the original, if you could believe the advertising fliers. One per customer. I managed to snag one of the few that hadn't already been dragged away by the crowd, a sorry-looking stalk with a few ragged, yellow leaves, and even for that sad specimen I had to beat off one of those old ladies hunched over like a question mark. I was brandishing a small hand-rake I'd grabbed from gardening supplies. "Don't make me use it," I threatened.
Hey, you do what you have to do, right? This was immortality we're talking about. Anyway, like I said, the tree wasn’t a very promising specimen. Its root ball was practically non-existent and its bark was missing in places, spotted with fungus in others. It came with instructions awkwardly translated from the Chinese, so awkwardly translated, in fact, as to be pretty much indecipherable. It would have been easier if I'd learned Chinese and read them in the original than trying to read that pidgin-English gobbledegook.
From the little I could garner, growing this tree was the first step in building yourself a soul. Building a soul? You might as well have told me I had to build a rocket ship to the moon! How was I to even start? No way I could do it alone, from scratch. I’d need all of human evolution to do it, from the caveman to NASA. How long would that take? Ten-thousand years? There simply wasn’t enough time.
Sure, theoretically I had a chance to build a soul and escape my earthly mortality, but it was in the same crap way they told us it was possible that we could win the lottery or grow up to become President of the United States. In other words, forget it.
The vast majority of us aren't going anywhere; we're going to rot in a box right here under the earth and that’s just the way it is. Let’s face it. Not everyone can be Beethoven or Picasso either. Does it make any more sense to bitch that we can't all be immortal? So I'm destined to be fertilizer for the next generation's crop of Trees-of-Life. Oh well, that's life and the opposite of life, too. I’m sure not alone so how can I bellyache? Why should I be any exception to the rule? What makes me think I'm so special? From what I saw at the Home Depot, it's probably just as well.
Good riddance to us all.
Hey, you do what you have to do, right? This was immortality we're talking about. Anyway, like I said, the tree wasn’t a very promising specimen. Its root ball was practically non-existent and its bark was missing in places, spotted with fungus in others. It came with instructions awkwardly translated from the Chinese, so awkwardly translated, in fact, as to be pretty much indecipherable. It would have been easier if I'd learned Chinese and read them in the original than trying to read that pidgin-English gobbledegook.
From the little I could garner, growing this tree was the first step in building yourself a soul. Building a soul? You might as well have told me I had to build a rocket ship to the moon! How was I to even start? No way I could do it alone, from scratch. I’d need all of human evolution to do it, from the caveman to NASA. How long would that take? Ten-thousand years? There simply wasn’t enough time.
Sure, theoretically I had a chance to build a soul and escape my earthly mortality, but it was in the same crap way they told us it was possible that we could win the lottery or grow up to become President of the United States. In other words, forget it.
The vast majority of us aren't going anywhere; we're going to rot in a box right here under the earth and that’s just the way it is. Let’s face it. Not everyone can be Beethoven or Picasso either. Does it make any more sense to bitch that we can't all be immortal? So I'm destined to be fertilizer for the next generation's crop of Trees-of-Life. Oh well, that's life and the opposite of life, too. I’m sure not alone so how can I bellyache? Why should I be any exception to the rule? What makes me think I'm so special? From what I saw at the Home Depot, it's probably just as well.
Good riddance to us all.
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