A Story With A Moral

A Story with a Moral

Some people want nothing more than for you to kiss their ass. They want to believe that they are the paradigm of something. A credible testimony can only come from them.

Am I like this? No. You might beg to differ, but I never really cared what you thought of me. All those times you pissed me off, I really didn’t care.  I may have lost some sleep. I may have broken some shit. It gets to me, but I don’t take it to heart. You aren’t going to change me.
See…I was born a mule. A witch cast a spell on me and now I’m doomed to walk upright as a human until the spell is broken. So, I’m stubborn as all fuck. Long story short: I shat on this woman’s yard and out came her wand. There I sat, a baby human with all my mule intelligence and memories but without any kind of human ability. I babbled. Shit myself. The witch raised me until I began to talk and ask questions. She sat me down one night when I was five and told me that I need to get my mule ass out of her life or she’d kill me for sport.
Of course you are wondering how the spell will be broken. The answer is world peace.

So, basically, I’m fucked. Have you watched tv lately? Unholy hell…what a terrible beast you humans be. I was watching some douchey pundit earlier and he spoke of gay people as if they were less of a creature. I don’t get how fucking someone with the same parts makes you a lower beast amongst beasts.

Anyway, no person wants to have their asses handed to them, so I’ll tell you a story. One of happiness and smiles. There won’t be any cop-drama fake murder and there won’t be any scantily clad, no talent women. No asinine presidents and definitely not one reality tv chauvinist.
A long time ago there was a city called Wyandotte. It bustled with business and prosperity and everyone got along. There was a strait in the city. People would gather in the park and respect one another. No one said anything derogatory. No one assumed that anyone was insane and everyone got the benefit of the doubt no matter what they looked like.

On a ray of sunshine, Kelly smiled her way thru the park. Near the library she met Carrie. They fell in love right away. Everyone in town was so happy for them. No one had anything bad to say because being a meddlesome cynic was unheard of. No one had heard of Jesus Christ, so no one had any reason to judge anyone or be a hoity-toity narcissist that shoved their beliefs down the throats of everyone else.
Kelly and Carrie had their wedding a week later and it made the town grow together even more. Seriously, the average amount of smiles and hugs doubled after those 2 got hitched.

Carrie’s brother married a woman from Lebanon. She was a wonderfully brilliant person and no one had anything racist to say about Middle Eastern people.

No one even had bad thoughts because there weren’t any bad thoughts to begin with. There were no news reports by ignoramuses exploiting tragedy. No one was raised to believe that the world is ever going to end. There wasn’t a toxic thought in a human mind at all.
Carrie’s brother, Jeff, owned a small photography shop. Under that shop lived the happiest elf on Earth. The elf’s name was Barack and he loved to make so much sense that it almost inspired jealousy…but envy didn’t exist. There’s no room for envy when everyone works together and appreciates one another.

Anyway, Barack told a story of a far off land where stingy people used inflation to ruin their society. The townspeople of Asu were so fucking greedy that they wanted to squeeze every last cent out of everything they sold so they were always upping the cost of everything. This led to more inflation. No one realized that normalizing the prices of everything would have saved them and, tragically, they all died.
Barack felt bad for telling the story because he knew that the people of Wyandotte were all equally intelligent, but with different fortes. He had a small fear that the residents would start to think like the people of Asu because they now knew that humans were capable of being stingy idiots. Yet, in his heart Barack knew that things like that wouldn’t happen because everyone learned from their mistakes and could objectively learn things secondhand because they weren’t dotards.

Everyone loved Barack’s stories. Some of them had a tough lesson behind them, but most of them were full of happiness. He always told a few stories each night. He would start with a few happy stories of peace treaties and trust. He would then tell a dark story…one where the people of Asu couldn’t comprehend that people from other lands were equally self-sufficient, so they forced other nations to be just like them cuz they thought they were infallibly right.

Barack would then tell everyone that Asu was an ancient land from the Forgotten Ages. He then told more stories of people helping one another fix things like houses that accidentally caught fire so they didn’t linger in cities like Wyandotte. There was no use in having dangerous eyesores when there were so many strong people that loved one another.

Jeff, his wife Fatima, Kelly, Carrie, and Barack were sitting around a fireplace when a wizard appeared to them. He said he was named Flimgom. He looked very, very old. Barack was thousands of years old…which was why he knew so much about Asu. Flimgom was tens of thousands of years old. His wisdom was far greater than anything anyone could ever imagine. He was a kind person.

Flimgom the wizard asked Fatima if she knew of the Dirt Box of Clarm. She hadn’t. According to the wise old wizard, the Dirt Box of Clarm was a cube the size of a softball that held no magickal power, but was opined as priceless because it was made of dirt. Not gold. Not silver. Dirt. People valued dirt more than anything.

From under his cloak, Flimgom pulled out the Dirt Box of Clarm. He handed it to Fatima and she smiled. It was amazing because it stayed a cube for no reason. It wasn’t glued or a muddy work of art. It was a lump of dirt. Fatima passed it to Jeff and then he to Carrie and then to Kelly and finally to Barack. Barack asked Flimgom who owned the Dirt Box of Clarm. The wizard told him that no one owns it. It belongs to everyone but it normally stays in Clarm since that’s where it was found.

Flimgom told everyone that the cube represented more than any amount of money could replace. No one wanted it because once they knew what it was, they realized that having it would serve no purpose whatsoever. The Dirt Box of Clarm was really an idea. We, as Earthlings, ought to value dirt more than any rare jewel.

Barack then told a dark story about Asu. He said that back in the Forgotten Ages, something like the Dirt Box of Clarm would have been stolen by a greedy fucking asshole. The humans looked at him and asked what he meant by ‘stolen’. Barack hadn’t told the people of Wyandotte about theft. He looked at Flimgom with eyes that asked if it was right to tell the humans of thievery. He smiled and nodded.
Kelly, Carrie, Jeff, and Fatima were horrified by the idea of stealing. They all agreed that Asu must have been a terrible place and that the Forgotten Ages were better left forgotten. How is anyone ever supposed to move on to a great future when hung up on remembering atrocity after atrocity? You can’t. Luckily, the Forgotten Ages were thousands of years before.

Flimgom told everyone how the books and movies of that age were all destroyed in a great forgetting. After Asu ruined itself, all the lands of Earth were deeply saddened. They realized their own parts played and swore to never let humanity get that fucking stupid again. A Final War had taken place in Asu. Armies from all across Earth covened there and over a billion people died.

In the aftermath, everyone was hit by a blast of insight. Everyone asked themselves: What the fuck have we come to?

The wizard then went on to tell a short story about a guy named Jesus. There was a book written about him. It was widely misconstrued and was the justification for much of the Final War. People from all over Earth destroyed every last copy of the book. All other religious texts were destroyed. Everyone agreed that faith isn’t found in a book. What happens after death didn’t matter because so many were lost.
Barack wiped a tear away from his cheek. Only Flimgom saw it. The others had never cried for any reason other than getting hurt in an accident.

The Dirt Box of Clarm was handed back to Flimgom, who placed it on the mantle. He said that the cube is not a reminder of the chaos that transpired that led to the forgetting. It was found in one of the Abandoned Lands some time after the Final War. Back in the Forgotten Ages, there existed third world countries…places of destitution, sadness, and hunger. After the war, world hunger was solved. Kindness led the way. It took many years, but all the destruction was repaired and a few of the third world countries’ residents completely left. They said it was better to leave those lands to nature.

One day, an anthropologist was exploring what is now Clarm and found the cube. It seemed to beckon the anthropologist. A small society was built.

Flimgom explained that the society wasn’t better by any means than any other society. The cube kinda represents the idea that some things are unforgettable but memories are somehow infinitesimal. The present is always taking us into the future and we’ve got less and less time to remember things that happened before our age.

After the Final War, people remembered it vividly. As generations came and went, what it was had been taught and talked of. Colleges had courses on it. Documentaries were made. Years passed and it became a chapter in a history book and people talked of it less frequently. More time passed and no one wanted to learn about it. The ultimate lesson had been learned. After so long, bringing it up was a futility, so people quit talking about it.

There was a lot to forget with the Forgotten Ages. There were a terrible amount of wars that preceded the Final War. There were unspeakable corruptions. Hundreds and hundreds of words existed for all the bad things that went on. There was no use for images of the slain, mangled, and hateful. All of it got lumped into one meme that may always remain, but even scratching the surface of what the Forgotten Ages were leads to enough reason to keep on forgetting.

Flimgom looked at his watch and told his friends that it was time for him to go. They all hugged him goodbye. He grabbed the Dirt Box of Clarm and waved goodbye. Then, he vanished.

The rest of the friends sat in a calm silence for a while.

Barack then told a story of finding a meadow full of flowers when he was a youth. They all exchanged stories on thru the night. They lived happily ever after.  The end.

So that’s my story. I’m sure a psychologist would say it’s just me fantasizing about how this spell might be broken. I do ponder it a lot. I try to make the best of this situation. For that is what we must do when we find ourselves stubborn mules trapped in human bodies.

THE END