loopinfinite

I’m at the beach, standing toe-deep in squishy sand. The tide is in. The saltwater laps corrosively at my feet. It makes them burn.

This is not a comfortable situation for me. I’d love nothing more than to get the hell out of here.

But I can’t do that. I’m here for a reason.

There’s an island I have to get to. It’s far off, near the horizon, smothered in rolling fog. It’s hard to see, but I know it’s there.

The island has a name. The name of the island is Getting Shit Done. I need to get there, but how? I don’t have a boat. I can’t swim.

Is there some other way?

If only I were taking an intelligence test. Then this scenario would have a solution, and it’d be something neat and tidy and clever.

Real life is never neat, never tidy and never clever.

In real life, if you fall out of a plane that’s fifteen thousand feet above sea level with no parachute, you fucking die.

With an intelligence test, a psychologist will tell you, “You just fell out of an airplane. The airplane was fifteen thousand feet above sea level. You didn’t have a parachute, yet somehow you survived the fall. How?”

And you would say, with suave confidence, “Elementary, my dear psychologist. The airplane was parked on a runway in the Himalayas.”

In real life, if you walk into a bar and are immediately knocked unconscious, it’s because somebody beat the shit out of you.

With an intelligence test, if you walk into a bar and are immediately knocked unconscious, it’s because you walked into an iron bar.

I can hear a psychologist now: “You are standing on a beach. You are staring at an island, which is several miles away. You want to get to this island, but you have no boat and you can’t swim. How will you get there?”

I would say, with suave confidence, “Elementary, my dear psychologist. You never actually said there was an ocean, so I would just walk.” A neat, tidy, clever solution.

But this is real life. There really is an ocean here.