99 cent stores, beware!

While meditating yesterday, I was suddenly distracted by an ingenius idea that is going to put you ALL out of business.

The 99 cent store as we know it is history.

Say hello to next stage of evolution: The 98 cent store.

Who the heck is gonna pay 99 cents when they can get the same damn thing for 98 cents? Hah! 99 cents is outrageous - and it must not stand I tell you.

The time has come for an intelligent alternative.

My 98 cent empire will sweep the nation, then the world, untouchable. Others will be too greedy or too cowardly to lower their price to 97 cents - for at least a quarter or two.

After that I'd just sell-off to the competition because who the hell wants to run a 96 cent store empire anyways.

I'd rather drive a disco-dancing fire-breathing Japanese robot or film building implosions.

"How long does a human live on Mars?", my wife asked.

Me: "The same, about 70 Earth years."
Her: "How long is that on Mars?"
Me: "How long is that on Earth?"
Her: "Huh?"
Me: "How long is it anywhere?"

It's so easy for us to believe that we know exactly how all of this works - probably because we desperately want to believe. It's pretty obvious, though, that we don't - we can't even move around in our own dimension without our systems quickly becoming nonsensical.

Go ahead, set your alarms, synchronize your watches, datestamp your blog entries...
...but don't get too caught-up in it, okay?
...it's just a model.

It's quite possible that everything is actually happening at once, and that time is just a funny idea we came-up with to help hunt for food. :)

What's money? Money is a Hershey bar. Or a motel room. Or a Ferrari. Or maybe it's nothing at all.

I think back to when I was a kid, we were dirt poor. I remember cutting-out a photo of a Hershey bar from an ad and thinking how badly I wanted it. At times it seemed in all the world I wanted nothing more than for that picture to be a real Hershey bar. Perhaps it drove all my future ambitions, wanting that stupid candy bar.

Now I can buy as many as I want - and I have, sure, I've bought a case of Hershey bars (haven't you?). Ya know what, it didn't do much for me. I got the impression that a truckload wouldn't do any more.

A chocolate bar's about what, $0.65 nowadays? I'm puzzled by the fact that $65 worth of chocolate won't serve the desires that might once have been appeased by 1/100th that. What happened?

Somewhere there's a little boy with a picture of a Hershey bar in his pocket. The loose change under my couch is enough to quench his wants. Or is it?

Somewhere a man is panhandling outside a Wal-Mart for the $65 he needs to put his family in a motel room for the night. 1/10th of my 'liquid' fund is enough to quench his wants. Or is it?

Somewhere under Bill Gates' couch is $65,000 in loose change. Would that quench someone's desires for a (cheap) Ferrari? Would that make someone happy?

Somehow I doubt it...

...but I'm going to wander around town today giving-out Hershey bars
...ya know, just in case. :)

PS: You know what, maybe you could find that guy outside Wal Mart and buy him a sandwich or a case of Hershey bars or baby food. Yeah, that'd be a solid deal.

I was just thinking how funny it is that we tend to think of death as being the ultimate obstacle of our perpetual happiness. Having mastered, say, the mortal planes, it's only death that stands to interrupt eternal bliss, right?

But I wonder if that's not just a lame excuse - we blame death because death is the first obstacle we're likely to encounter that we can't mitigate. Perhaps we only think of death as the ultimate hurdle because it hides from us the many other chasms into which our happines would fall - if given enough time.

If, say, you lived on and beat death - well you'd probably find yourself facing osteoporosis. Or you beat that but now the problem is too much sound.

Or not enough of it.

Or light. Or boredom. Or the morning dew, even a light breeze. Exhaustion.

None of those sound very pretty.

Death is not, I don't think, an obstacle. Consider it a "soft measure" - an easy, graceful, dignified exit from the stage. Before your energy wanes and you begin to waver. Before your spotlight fades.