Captain_Awesome

Never ever send your burritos back at a restaurant. Just don’t. Not if they come out of the kitchen cold, or burnt, or hairy. Not even if while visiting the facilities you wandered past the kitchen and saw the chef stripping down an old leather chair and throwing the bits into a pot of boiling water. Captain Awesome won’t extrapolate, but sufficed to say it’s just not a good idea. If you absolutely can’t bring yourself to eat them hide them in your purse or man-purse or the nearest potted plant. Captain Awesome believes that burritos were designed around the concept of turning any collection of normally inedible things into a meal so delicious that you forget your last encounter with them. The angry gods of the restaurant kitchen do not forgive.

unveils the truth about Oregon.

And speaking of bears that reminds Captain Awesome of the reason that he has never been to Oregon.

Imagine, if you will the year 1984. America continued it’s love affair with the mullet, Hulkamania was born, and a young boy hurtling towards a date with destiny attended The Upper Glen Tay Correctional School for the Overly Imaginative.

His teacher had decided that a good way to get the class interested in history was to sneak it into their brain in the guise of a computer game. Not just any game either, but the most insidiously addictive game ever unleashed on a group of elementary school students. The name of that game which still haunts the dreams of Captain Awesome and rips him from his slumber in a cold sweat reaching for his flintlock is The Oregon Trail.

For those of you who have never played that particular game, Captain Awesome will sum it up for you. On the surface the purpose was to lead settlers in wagons through the lands of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Southern Narnia, and Mordor to the Shangri La that was Oregon. To do this you needed to carefully provision your settlers and make all of the important decisions that they would face along the way. This, however was not the essence of the game. Young Captain Awesome very quickly decoded the real purpose of the game. That purpose was to shoot bears. Not real bears to be sure. They are majestic and wonderful animals that will peel your skin off in long succulent strips if you approach them. They are the angry hippies of the natural world. No, Captain Awesome is referring to virtual, computer generated bears who packed the lands of that game so thick you had to shoot three of them just to get behind the wheel of your wagon.

While his classmates quickly grew tired of the game Captain Awesome persevered. Every chance he could he would play that game. He would eat his lunch and shoot bears, skip recess to shoot bears and sneak away from class to shoot bears. But despite the enormous amounts of time spent and his ever increasing skill at shooting bears he struggled to achieve the secondary goal of reaching Oregon. Overladen as they were with bear pelts, bear meat and ammunition his wagons sank in the rivers that he attempted to ford. His settlers died of scurvy, type 2 diabetes, and the gout, and his attempts to fashion replacement wagon parts out of bear skeletons failed time and again.

By the time his teacher and the school psychologist banned the playing of the game on school grounds Captain Awesome had made 167 unsuccessful attempts to bring his settlers to Oregon. Captain Awesome learned 3 things that year:

1) Never eat a lunch that your dad has packed for you. Best not to even open the bag.
2) Since girls don’t have a urinal in their bathroom they obviously don’t have to pee. Hence, they are clearly robots.
3) If your hand can cover your entire face it means you have cancer, and your brother is going to hit you in the face.
4) Playing 13 straight hours of The Oregon Trail will not adequately prepare you for your history exam
5) It’s impossible to get to Oregon without some sort of wormhole. The only people who live there were born there.

So there it is. Oregon will forever be that wonderful dream, glimpsed from afar but unattainable.

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE. ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME… SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.

She tried to assemble her thoughts.

THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON’T TRY TO TELL ME THAT’S RIGHT.

“Yes, but people don’t think about that,” said Susan. Somewhere there was a bed…

CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE’S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A… A BED IS A NORMAL THING. IT IS A MOST AMAZING TALENT.

“Talent?”

OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY. YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS.

“You make us sound mad,” said Susan. A nice warm bed…

NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME? said Death.

—(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)