From: mrdorbin@tycho.physics.purdue.edu (Matt Dorbin)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Daybreak
Date: 1 Dec 1997 05:30:36 GMT
Organization: Purdue University
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Message-ID: <65ti1s$84s@mozo.cc.purdue.edu>
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We are conjurers, all of us. We take a single person, and with magic
incantations we make him into something else, something greater. A hero.
Sometimes the spell breaks. When it does, some avert their eyes out
of respect for what once was. Others stare, goggle-eyed, at the deflation
from hero to man.

We tell stories about our heroes. It gives meaning to our lives. I have
often wondered, when the heroes gather, and need meaning, who they tell
stories of.

I suspect it is something like this.

A day in the life of Nobody Special

The morning shone through the window pane, awakening our not-a-hero in his
Fortress of Solitude in downtown Burbank. Sitting up, he stretched and gazed
blearily about his underground bedroom.

A bit of biography on our not-a-hero. This particular Nobody Special was
thirty-two years of age, male, and had a penchant for pork rinds and corn
mush. He considered the greatest moment in his life to have been the afternoon
he achieved total slack by watching another man play solitaire for four
hours straight, and then defended his assertion before a tribunal of judges,
who awarded him a decree of 'total slack.' He was also the nineteenth
incarnation of the Dalai Lama, but this does not figure into our story.

And so we return to our not-a-hero in his Fortress of Solitude, preparing a
breakfast of pork rinds and corn mush, and travelling to his job. Sitting
in his cubicle, he writes a memo that had occurred to him during his
seventeen-minute unicycle commute.

To: That guy in the cubicle across from mine
From: Nobody Special
Re: Last night

	Last night, I dreamed that I was in the cafeteria, and you walked
past with your arms full of packages. I volunteered to help you carry them
to your car. In the hallway on the way to the car, I asked you if you
thought that if I ever became truly happy, if it would be because
circumstances changed to meet my standards or if my standards would change
to fit the circumstances. You asked what the difference was, and I told you
I wouldn't want to be happy if it meant going against my principles, and you
asked me where I got my principles, and I said mathematical induction.
You said that this reminded you of the story of the man who built a machine
to tell him the names of all saints, that he might ask them for intercession.
The very first thing, you said, that the machine printed out was "Pray for
us, Saint Pinnochio." Then I woke up.
	Please stay out of my head until such time as you are prepared
to make sense.

	Nobody Special

	Satisfied, our not-a-hero slumps back into his chair, and completes
another day of work in meaningless fashion.

	The End

I think that's the sort of story heroes tell.
Of course, I could be completely wrong. I'm not a hero, after all.