Why We Need Better Cylinders
Let’s all take a moment here to remember the great cylinders of yesterday. Remember back when you could go to the store and come home with a cylinder that was so new and shiny, so perfectly polished and aromatic, that people would come from miles and miles around just to admire your new cylinder? And then on the weekend when you took that cylinder out for a walk in the park, all of the dogs would come and sniff it until their noses fell off, simply because of how awesome it was?
Yes, those were the days when people really knew how to make a good cylinder. Today it seems that we wind up with a lot of pyramids and dreary, prickly misshapen lumps that wouldn’t impress even an easily impressed dog, let alone a jaded dog whose seen every shape in the universe the way most dogs have.
I don’t know why that is. I don’t understand why cylinders are so hard to get right for this generation, but that seems to be the way it is. The next thing you know, they’ll be trying to build mansions out of aluminum foil and bubble wrap, and driving to work in a polluted lake of fish and diapers.
And, to me, that seems like the wrong way to go. It feels like we’re regressing instead of whatever the opposite of regressing would be. Unregressing? Deregressing? Something like that. English, you always did have a way of messing up my brain with your crazy funny words like that.
One time for my birthday I got a glazed cylinder that was so delicious, I practically shot steam out of my ears and somersaulted across the floor. Almost. I wound up writing poems about that amazing cylinder for many years after that, posting them up on telephone poles around the neighborhood until I was eventually arrested for telephone pole vandalism. But at least I got my poems out there, and people knew that such a tasty glazed cylinder did exist in the world.
That’s the kind of thing that gives people hope and keep them from just flying off to Mars to start a new life there, probably involving mining for Mars rocks and selling ice cream to the little Martian kids who love ice cream so much. My poems kept them here, doing whatever dead-end job they were already doing.
And that’s why we need a return to the great cylinders of our past, before everyone moves to Mars to open an ice cream shop. The Martian economy can’t sustain two billion ice cream shops!