A Day in the Life of a Brown Car, by guest artist Snake (circa 2005)

To reiterate, this is not an original work. Please Harvard, do not sic the registrar on me.

There is a brown car, driving around a cloverleaf on the highway. No one else is on the highway, just this man, who is driving. As he proceeds down the looping road, he realizes, there’s no way off of this cloverleaf. There are no roads leading away from it, and there are no roads leading up to it. So, he keeps riding for a few hours, hoping that somehow, miraculously, a solution will present itself, but it never does. He starts to panic—he can’t think of any way to save himself. So he continues on this perpetual looping journey.

Over the course of about an hour, he comes to accept his position, and figures that it’s probably not that bad. Certainly not when it’s compared to other situations he could be in. But then, one terrible thought comes to him. He realizes, “If I’m to do this for the rest of my life, it’s going to take a lot of gas. This means that I’m going to need some money.” Again, panic. This time, no reassuring ideas come to end his problem. Driving on, he starts to feel hungry, then very hungry. It becomes painfully apparent that he needs to eat. Chicken, potato, apples, visions and tastes of food tease his mind. Depression sets in. Stuck on a never-ending voyage, with half a tank, no money to fill it, and no food.

Perhaps it was his fear, or maybe it was the fact that it was starting to get dark, he works out his problem. He decides that the best possible thing he can do is to pull over somewhere and set up a small stand, from which he will sell hamburgers. This makes everything better. It gives him food, money for gas, and more importantly, something to do, to distract himself anyway, and give him financial trouble providing further distraction. So he pulls over his red car, and sets up this small hamburger establishment.

Now he sees another car, a red car, traveling on the same endless route. He chuckles to himself, knowing what the driver must be thinking, and he feels as if he has conquered something. He watches this car from his stand for about two hours, it’s getting darker. He thinks that this new car will never save itself. To his surprise, the car pulls over beside his. The driver walks over to the stand, and begins to look at the menu. Complaining that plain hamburgers are not satisfying to his palate, he leaves. The end result of this first customer experience is not quite what the entrepreneur would have preferred. He looks over to the red car, and is about to say something, when he notices that the other man is setting up a stand of his own, right next to his.

The man walks over to this new stand. He looks at the menu. The only thing available was ketchup. Considering himself superior to the condiment-only market, the man mocks the ketchup salesman. An argument ensues. This continues on and off for several days. Eventually, the two men learn to coexist, until late one night, years later, the ketchup salesman snuck over to the hamburger stand, and quietly set a fire. The next morning, the now retired hamburger salesman found the burnt remains and called the police. Unfortunately, no one could think of any possible suspects.