01
Dec
10

we are not having fun yet

The inventor of the Bowflex Home Fitness System rose in the morning and padded gently over a trail of flower petals covering the hallway from his bedchamber to his mansion’s palatial dining room, where servants immediately appeared to pull his chair out and give him his breakfast. Right away, an ostrich steak was placed in front of him and he noted the precision with which the grill marks had been arranged to make a perfect grid of squares; that morning four previous ostrich steaks had been grilled to perfection, then thrown unceremoniously into the garbage as he slept in, all in the service of ensuring that he had a fresh, hot one without having to wait.

At the conclusion of his meal, he took leave of the dining room to stroll the grounds, uncharacteristically unaccompanied save for the odd peacock that may cross his path as he meditated. The synthetic glands he had had surgically implanted a few years ago to improve his personal musk kissed the air with subtle, tasteful hints of vanilla emanating from his pores. A life lived in sweet repose since he had invented the Bowflex Home Fitness System, rich with the spoils delivered by his youthful triumph, had purged even the memory of want or hunger from his mind until this day, when he sensed something amiss within him.

His mind drifted to his wife, specifically to the memory of a vacation they took together when he was working at a car dealership to put her through grad school. For weeks he had saved a few dollars at a time in an envelope in his sock drawer for them to get away and spend a weekend camping. They had held each other in the pale gold haze of morning in a dew-dampened pup tent among the pop-up campers and RVs. Having spent decades of leisure hence in the French Riviera, skiing in the Alps, or sunning themselves on the island of Crete, it seemed ridiculous that they had once been so happy with so little, but the event derived its value from the scarcity of resources fastidiously gathered together to make it happen.

The warm rush of the jets in his cognac-filled jacuzzi as a robotic bather ran a sponge over his back offered scant comfort as he contemplated, as if for the first time, what it truly meant to be a man. After an immeasurable amount of time he emerged, having silently resolved to complete his long-abandoned follow-up project to the Bowflex Home Fitness System, a complex network of high-speed turbines sealed in a glass enclosure, that when spinning form a zero-gravity environment for the user to sleep in to slow the sag of the earlobes brought on by aging.


1 Response to “we are not having fun yet”


  1. December 8, 2010 at 2:39 am

    Absurd, yet oddly touching! And funny!


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