“Let’s do it!!!”
Neither of them ever got anything published. In fact, those who read their writing went so far as to say that they misunderstood literature on an unusually fundamental level.
But after a few years, they got to be pretty good thieves.
Confucius at Home
“I’m hungry,” said Confucius to a nearby servant. “Is there any food around? Some noodles, maybe?”
“CONFUCIUS SAY: BRING NOODLES!” shouted the servant to the cook.
“Hey, hey, please calm down,” said Confucius. “It’s just a question. Only if it’s convenient.”
“CONFUCIUS SAY: CALM DOWN!” shouted the servant to the rest of the household.
“Stop it, okay?” snapped Confucius. “Not everything is a thing.”
“CONFUCIUS SAY: NOT EVERYTHING IS A THING.”
Dammit, thought Confucius, and he was about to interrupt him again—but didn’t. That one sounded pretty good, he had to admit. And the one before wasn’t so bad, either, if interpreted in the right way.
“You get those last two?” Confucius whispered to his scribe, who was sitting in the corner. “ ‘Calm down,’ and the other one?”
The scribe nodded.
“I don’t know, maybe.” Confucius shrugged. “Not the noodles one, obviously.”
But if the scribe wanted to write those other two down … well, Confucius wasn’t going to stop him.
War
The two children began a game of war.
This is a good idea, thought both children. Soon, I will win. Then the game will be over, I will be happy, and we can both go do other things.
But no matter how many times they played war, they always forgot how tedious, how tiresome, how emotionally debilitating, how devoid of reward, and how maddeningly left to chance the game was; and how they always regretted having started the contest well before the time it was over.
In that way, it wasn’t too unlike the game of bridge.
If You Love Something
If you love something, let it go.
If you don’t love something, definitely let it go.
Basically, just drop everything, who cares.
Just an Idea
When the couple won the $18 millon Powerball jackpot, they found out they had two options. They could accept the state’s default payout structure, which would come to $600,000 a year over thirty years; or they could let a company buy the ticket from them for a single upfront payment of ten million dollars.
Both options sounded good.
And they didn’t have to decide right away, anyway.
They spent the weekend celebrating in secret with lots of champagne and side dishes.
Rich, forever.
On Monday morning, as they walked up the steps of the Ohio Lottery Commission headquarters, a woman in a business suit intercepted them and presented them with a third option.
An artist named Damien Hirst was in the market for a lottery ticket just like this one, the woman explained. Would they be interested in selling the ticket to him, through her, right now, for the flat fee of twelve million dollars?
“What’s he going to do with it?” asked the husband.
“He’s going to stamp the word VOID on it and sell it for fifty million dollars.”
The wife didn’t get that at all, but the husband said he kind of did, maybe.
“We’ll talk about it,” said the husband. “We’ll get back to you tomorrow.”
That night they looked up the artist online.
“It’s the idea of it,” explained the husband. “See? All this stuff. It’s the idea.”
The next morning they called the woman and told her they’d do it.
“Excellent!” she said.
They signed some paperwork and handed her the ticket, and she handed them a certified check for twelve million dollars.
And even better: nobody had to know they won. They could tell anyone they wanted, or no one if they wanted. No security concerns, no privacy concerns. No sob stories or television cameras or suspicious relatives they’d never heard of.
Just the two of them and the millions and millions of dollars.
The night before they were going to deposit the certified check, the husband awoke so startled by an idea that he had to wake up his wife to run it by her, too.
What if we called the woman back and offered to sell them the twelve-million-dollar check for fifteen million dollars? He could stamp VOID on the check, too!
“I like it,” she said.
The next day they called the woman with their proposal that Damien Hirst could buy back their undeposited certified check for fifteen million dollars.
“Why would he do that?” asked the woman.
“Well, he could do whatever he wants with it,” said the husband. “For example: he could stamp VOID on the check and then sell that for seventy million dollars.”
“Sell what for seventy million dollars?”
“The voided check to us.”