From: mdw@theory.TC.Cornell.EDU (Matt Welsh)
Subject: Euthanasia: Breakfast of Champions
Organization: Cornell Theory Center
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 05:42:12 GMT

Euthanasia: Breakfast of Champions

She was like a comet, returning from aphelion, after years of aimlessly
orbiting in the dark cold void of space. As she approached, the rays from the
sun heater her surface, causing the ice on her rocky core to boil, and an
ion trail began to form, extending for millions of miles behind her path.
And what a great tail it was-- luminescent, soft, glowing-- visible to
astronomers all over the globe--

Something snapped in my train of thought, and suddenly I was on a bus to
Cairo, with a Spanish-speaking Calculus teacher standing at the front, 
preaching to the passengers about the wonders of indeterminate Taylor
series like some mad monk addicted to opium. I tried to wipe the putrid
image away, like a smudge on a window, but it was only replaced by something
more inexplicably bizarre-- I was lying in a deep pit, somewhere in the
"Pitfall" video game on a zit-faced teenager's Activision. I felt my muscles
move involuntarily, and suddenly I sprung up from my prone position and
lept over the edge of the pit with a jump that would make any steroid-free
pro basketball player jealous. I began to run, swinging on vines over tar
pits and alligators, picking up useless trinkets and bags of gold (which for
some reason did not in the least bit hamper my agility)-- somehow I felt that
there was a deeper meaning to all of this-- like it wasn't just a game--
maybe I was on a quest to find truth in the universe--

But the kid playing the video game got his timing off, and I was abruptly
hurled, screaming, into the jaws of a hungry electronic alligator. My last
thought was "I just hope he gets the high score."

I waited around for three years in the blank frigid purgatory of video game
death, but obviously the kid had long since retired the Activision to the
attic and replaced it with a sexy new 16 bit Super Nintendo. I longed to be
incarnated as a modern Super Mario, for my movement would have been smoother,
I would have been rendered in more colors, and the background music would have 
been considerably more intricate. No such luck.

I began to slam my head repeatedly into the wall, just for the hell of it, and
before long I was making quite an opening in the brick. Exhilarated, I 
continued my dastardly human-cum-jackhammer activities until I could see 
through to the other side-- warm light poured into the room, bathing me with
its soft comfy glow-- I realized with a start and a gasp of relief that I was
in the very bathroom of the Oral-B "dentist", who was (of course) brushing
his teeth. And, as much as I'd like to give away his much-shrouded true 
identity at this point I can't find it within my id to stoop so low-- after
all, this man IS a dentist, so we can't show you his face on television. I
stepped through the fissure and brushed myself off-- I was about to say "Hi"
to provoke that cheery wave, when he picked me up, dissolved me in a cup of
water by the sink, and swallowed the resulting solution in one hearty gulp.

So I was having a bad day. Not only was my head killing me, but now I was
dissapated into a million particles in some bozo dentist's digestive tract.
There was no other choice. I has to take the hard way out. I activated my
special forearm nuclear self-destruct apparatus, which I ripped off from
the Predator, and began to punch in the automatic destruct sequence-- the
panel came to life and alien digits lit up, counting down the seconds until...

I was saved, as was everyone in a 20 mile radius around me, by the fact that
the Hubble constant was much larger than was originally theorized, and the
Universe suddenly collapsed upon itself to an infinitely dense mass centered
about two and a half feet north of the Ti river in China. Thank God for
errors in theoretical astrophysics! Works every time.

mdw

-- 
Matt Welsh    mdw@tc.cornell.edu        +1 607 253 2737
Systems Programmer, Cornell Theory Center
  "Yow! Up ahead! It's a DONUT HUT!!"
Xref: sparky alt.non.sequitur:342 talk.bizarre:33441