Thoreau and Vonnegut - Day 10

Some bearded man who enjoyed peace and quiet, and, incidentally, to write about it a lot, once wrote in his book about a pond called Walden that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…” or some such.

Listen: I lead a life of quiet desperation, wherein my dreams are vivid but the actual events of my life are undertaken with a hesitancy befitting a young group of infantrymen told by their superiors to charge across no-man’s-land during the first world war.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a story about a race of aliens that lived on an inhospitable planet on the outer reaches of a far-off galaxy where the only thing that could possibly sustain life was a little cactus that grew near the only pools of water on the planets rocky surface, which were located around its equator. These cacti lived symbiotically with the aliens. Both species grew to full size within 10 days of their birth without consuming any nutrients, and after the 10 days, an alien would eat one of the cacti, and immediately die after laying an egg that would spawn a new alien and emitting a spore that would plant a new cactus.

This symbiosis continued until one day when an alien named Flitzak was bold and greedy enough to eat his cactus and his young, 5-day old neighbor’s 5-day old cactus at the same time. Flitzak died immediately, but only spawned one alien and one cactus for the two cacti he ate the two aliens whose death he was responsible for. Flitzak’s son was named Boltzak, and Boltzak, when he was but 5 days old, took to the field of young cacti and aliens, and instead of eating a cactus, which would have killed him and made him reproduce, he ate a minute-old alien, which

managed to quell his growing hunger without causing his death. Boltzak continued to eat young aliens whenever he got hungry, which was every 10 days or so, until there were no aliens left. Boltzak lived for 2 years and wrote a memoir extolling his cleverness and supposed greatness for cheating death. Boltzak died 10 days after he became the last surviving alien of his kind.

His memoir was found by a young space explorer named Klakhataka-tak-tak Bingo. Bingo laughed as he read it and condemned Boltzak for his boldness. On Bingo’s planet, no one ever dared to do anything out of the ordinary. They all liked to live in shacks by the many scenic ponds on their planet, rarely speaking to each other. They would only ever leave their planet if they were nearing death, as Bingo was, from a lack of things to eat. After putting Boltzak’s memoir down, Bingo remembered his hunger and wheezed in agony. Bingo’s spaceship malfunctioned as he was trying to take off, in order to get away from this planet where there was absolutely nothing left to eat. Bingo, his ship, and Boltzak’s memoir were incinerated by a deafening explosion.

People like me sometimes wish for things to happen to them like the explosion happened to Bingo because they are too meek to do something that interesting themselves.

So it goes.