Going through old notebooks, I found a “piece” penned by ten-year-old me, which I somehow managed to save from Kuwait. A precocious little turd, wasn’t I?
How To Tell The World To Go Suck An Egg
a.k.a. Ways To Make The World A Better Place For Me To Live In
1. Make all shops sell Poffak and Tang. (Poffak was the Arab equivalent of cheese puffs. No, not Cheetos, but cheese puffs. I had my priorities, people.)
2. Walk away from it. Find people who are smart and make them leave, too. (Sounds like this was around the time I first came across the concept of Galt’s Gulch.)
3. Study hard, work hard and become the most technologically advanced person in the world. (Ahh, youth, if you had only watched that awful Lawnmower Man or taken Frankenstein seriously back then.)
4. Buy a great big house and fortify it with strong, nuclear-war-proof material. Make your house completely self-sufficient. Horde food and works of art. (A touch of Hermann Goering combined with a premature case of hurricane bunker-ism?)
5. The world is destroying itself. Destruction started at the dawn of civilization and will end soon. Make yourself survive. If you care enough about yourself, you will. (If you only knew then that you now cannot even make it out of the house in the morning without a strong cup of coffee.)
6. Make friends all over the world and plan a time to flush all toilets on the planet at the same time. (Still has a lot of potential for funny, I say.)
—
E remembers his youth as well.
You are going to make some great kids…