What People Who Are Doing Better Than You Are Talking About
“…And so I told him, ‘Kid, you just gotta keep doing it, and you’ll be great.’”
“And he bought that?”
“Ate it up like a Hungry Hungry Hippo at a marble convention.”
“That’s crazy. You think he really believes he can be the best without knowing that super secret thing we never tell people?”
“Well if we told everyone the super secret thing we never tell people, then everyone would be great and where would we be? Definitely not here in this lavish two bedroom apartment in the West Village, eating gold caviar with forks made from frozen dinosaur tears.”
“We do have quite the set up. I especially like the hordes of modern art lining the walls, each more indescribably beautiful than the last.”
“They’re so indescribably I almost feel bad even talking about them. Lets never bring it up again.”
“Agreed. So you just told that kid to keep doing it, no matter what?”
“Yep, told him that even if you fail, just keep trying and eventually you’ll succeed.”
“Jesus Christ, what a hot crock of shit.”
“I know, right? But lately people have been eating that shit up like a Hungry Hungry Hippo at a Shit-That-Looks-Like-Marbles Convention.”
“Well these are the motivational times. Kids today got a quote stitched on every pillow and a Rocky Balboa speech on every pump up playlist.”
“How’s that one go again?”
“It’s not about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
“What a load of shit. Everyone knows it’s about how hard you can hit! Otherwise you’d just keep getting hit and getting up, doomed to an endless cycle of face punches, confronting each with a blazing determination as if they weren’t about to take fists to the face like marbles to a Hungry Hungry Hippo.”
“And even once you do take them, if you can’t hit hard you’ll just be hurting your fists!”
“No one ever got a knockout with a can do attitude, they got ‘em by having god damn bricks for hands!”
“God… That kid’s gonna spend years, failing night after night, just wishing he knew the super secret thing we never tell people.”
“Yeah, but this way he’ll never know there’s a super secret thing we never tell people, so he’ll probably just give up and manage a sports emporium sooner or later.”
“But what if he fails at that too? Should we tell him the super secret thing we never tell people so he can bring the most to his sports emporium?”
“See, that’s the great thing about sports emporiums. You can’t fail there. At most you ruin a 9th grader’s birthday, but that’s pretty low stakes in the grand scheme of things.”
“Upkeep and management of laser tag is a lot easier than achieving your dreams.”
“Exactly. Just let the burnt pizza and lackluster go-carts call the kid in like a middle class siren song, like it’s the Hungry Hungry Hippo’s mouth and he’s the marble.”
“But what if he doesn’t give up? What if he keeps taking life’s uppercuts and never enters the children’s food and entertainment industry?”
“Then he’ll fail and fail and keep failing. He may fail so much he starts thinking he’s doing well, but really he’s just failing with more style, all because he doesn’t know the super secret thing we never tell people.”
“How’d you figure it out, the super secret thing we never tell people?”
“My dad told me, and his dad told him, and his dad and his dad and his dad, all the way back until my great-great-great grandfather was told the super secret thing we never tell people from a passing gypsy woman on the streets of New Orleans. He was just an orphaned child when she approached him, as he was preforming a jazz dance routine for scraps and change. She came up and said she liked his spirit, and felt he had earned the knowledge of her ancestors. What about you?”
“Harvard.”
“Makes sense.”
“But do you think it’s fair for us to know and him not to?”
“Fair? Let me tell you something about fair. Is it fair for 9/10 Hungry Hungry Hippo games to be decided, not by the hunger of the hippo, but by the gravitational pull of the marbles, as well as the angel of the table, barely even accounting for the dexterity of the player’s wrist?”
“I guess not.”
“Right. So if he doesn’t know the super secret thing we never tell people, it’s not our fault. Blame the world for creating a game that relies on external factors!”
“Look… if you want to play again, we can play Hungry Hungry Hippos again.”
“That’s not what I was getting at at all, but if you’re offering…”