Ten years ago I designed a building for Hershey's hard candy division.
The exterior's water-soluble, but only barely, so that over time it wears
off in infinitesimal layers to reveal new colors underneath. Just enough
demand exists for pathetic repetition of that idea to keep me employed.
     I tried briefly to be proud of it, even creating a boat on the same
principle for my own use. The runoff gummed up my turbine before long,
though. What's left of the boat is junk in my garage, now. Leftovers.
     Now I have the opportunity to continue coasting, maybe for the rest of
my life. There's oil involved. A friend says I gave her the idea with my
schlock melting skyscrapers, something to do with sedimental deposits.
Shale? I'm supposed to invest in a process for extracting value from
something whose name I frankly do not know but for which a process has been
patented and tested. My assent will revolutionize some dying sector of the
energy industry and, since I'm getting in on the ground floor, cushion my
entry to a markedly early retirement.

     What to do on my last day of a quarter-lifetime of work? I need to
eat. Once my money is too copious to be dear to me, I will only eat
whatever is at hand, but now while the exchange still has significance I
shall buy the finest potables I can. I will also get out a pick and defrost
the freezer, because though it is banal I like purity. I can't decide how
else to enter the world of the rich--I know all the wrong ways to do it,
like buying a sporty convertible or finding religion. But aside from those
obvious pitfalls I can't figure out how to make the change from doing
nothing with my life over and over again to doing nothing a single time,
once and for all.

     I will buy not only unnecessarily sumptuous food, but more of it than
I need. It will stay preserved somehow; if I knew how to can foods, perhaps
that would do. I want it to outlast me.

     A boat that melts down to pontoons and a jammed motor is no longer a
boat. But was it ever? When I die I feel I will somehow have vanished more
than if the streets of several cities did not run candy-apple green after
every rainstorm on my account. I have several decades of probable luxury
ahead of me in which to be a person or something like one. I might design
another building somewhere amid it all but, well, I flatter myself.

by Aaron for Jess known as Trixie * eVille, Tuesday, 2002

By the time I opened Jess's order on Tuesday I had been sitting in near-direct desert sunlight for several hours. I was wearing a nice big hat and drinking water with some regularity, but still. I had just about made my body so unpleasant as to smoke my soul out of it, and with my soul gone I wrote this grim despairing thing.

Back in #45 there was another character with way too much money and a certain sadness over lending it to other people's projects; I will be keeping my eye on this trope in case it turns out to be some crucial element of my psychology.

Realizing that I had no plot and wasn't about to create one, I did consciously try to work this as a portrait. There's parallelism all over with permanent things vanishing and transient things persisting.

Not for the first time, I was reminded that when I drift, I end up writing about people failing. I don't think anyone's ever solved a mystery or finished any kind of assignment in one of these stories, for example. Well, it depends how you look at it.

I wrote "potable" when I meant "comestible". However, on the plus side, it's not easy to project a strong "detritus" feeling without using the word yet I seem to have done so.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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