Not on Your Life
There isn't a great, burning desire buried deep within one's soul, when you're a peanut.
In general, we try to avoid burning desires. And burning sensations of all sorts. But there's something else, too.
You see, peanuts, we don't do that introspection sort of thing. Whoa, hold on. I can hear you saying to yourself, "Hey, what the heck is this, then? This sounds pretty darn introspective to me."
And now you might be worried we can read minds or something, if you didn't say that out loud. Well, we can. Like mankind knows considerably less about the oceans than they do about the moon, they also know a whole lot less about peanuts than they do their own minds. Sure, we've got the normal baggage: what are we here for? Why is the sky blue? What time will the bus be here? I don't think I've run across one species that doesn't have those nagging... well, they're not fears, necessarily. Let's call 'em questions, because that's what they are.
But where we differ is that we peanuts are amongst the most well adjusted items in existence. So while it may look like we're introspecting, we're not. We're just calmly, cooly, taking stock of our inner lives. Taking a peek, and not letting it worry us, not letting it deter us from any other course of action we may have already determined we would be taking that day.
This brings up another possibly sore point. Yes, we can determine our actions for the day. People, sadly, or not, depending on how you look at it, don't. And can't. Here, I'll throw you a bone: the big debate about free will versus determinism that you thought was over? Yeah, wrong conclusion. Unless you came to the conclusion that people are ruled by determinism, and that you're not, as I gather popular opinion has it, free to do anything you please, influencing nothing at all in ways you weren't supposed to.
At least you guys don't get mashed into butter and shoved in a jar. That's one thing you've got going for you. And it's not your fault when you do mash us into a jar.
disclaimer:
At a bookstore near you, providing you live in New England, the collection of short stories called Fenway Fiction: Short Stories from the Red Sox Nation is now out and just dying to be bought, and then read, cover-to-cover, by you. And all your loved ones.
And then re-read to other loved ones, whom you should then exhort to go buy the book for themselves. Maybe you can even accompany them to the bookstore and pick up a couple extra copies to send to all your friends for Christmas and any other gift-giving holidays you may want to observe. While you're there, anyway, I mean.
You might suggest they go to Booklovers' Gourmet, in Webster, Massachusetts. If you don't live near Webster (and fair enough, we're guessing a lot of you don't, because last time we passed through it didn't look like it was suffering from overpopulation), you can try Tatnuck Bookseller in Worcester, MA. If you're still saying, "Nope, nowhere near Worcester, man, sorry, guess we'll just have to give up and call it a day," you can check out a good bookstore to go and buy the book at on Booksense.com. It's good to support your local independent bookshop. And it's really, incredibly good to support your Sane Magazine founder, who has a short story in the collection that may or may not have appeared here on Sane Magazine. So if you like Sane, there's a good chance you'll like Fenway Fiction, even if you don't particularly like baseball, or the Red Sox.
If your local bookstore doesn't carry Fenway Fiction, you could try a couple of things. 1) You could ask them to get it in for you. If enough people do this, they'll stock enough copies to choke a horse with, which would be handy, in the event that you have a horse that needs choking around. We'd prefer you read the collection, but whatever floats your boat. 2) You could click any of the links for Fenway Fiction, including the lovely graphic-ified one on the left hand side of this page, which'll be appearing on Sane Magazine for the time being to promote our very nice founder.
We'd really appreciate that. We'd appreciate you using and supporting your local bookstore, but we're happy for you to use and support Amazon, as well. They need love, too, you know. Have they not eyes? Have they not hands? Well, no, they're a faceless bunch of machines running all sorts of weird code type of things, so who cares what happens to them? Anyway, buy the book from someone.
Here's the kicker: if you buy the book, and you really, really want to, you can drop us an email at fenwayfiction@sanemagazine.com, and we'll give you the details to send the book off to us, COD, we'll get the founder to sign it or write a better ending to the story, or whatever you want, all for you, in blue or black pen, and we'll send it back to you. How's that? You don't see Alain de Botton doing that, do you? Nick Hornby? Nope. Michael Marshall? Nope, again. But the founder'll do it. That's how much he cares.
So we hope you buy our book. Or the book with our story in it. Thanks to Adam Emerson Pachter for his editorship and getting that particular Red Sox shaped ball rolling.
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