How Many Roads Must a Man Travel?

I am very excited, for today the Matter Sweeper is due to arrive at my door from the University of Palo Alto. Finally, I will have the satisfaction I have craved for so long. Looking back, it seems absurd that when I had a little trouble squeezing the last of the toothpaste out of this tube of Aim, I was ready to just throw it away and buy another one. Folly! Little did I know what I would have missed. First, on July 2, I placed a stack of seven bricks upon the tube, which very satisfyingly forced out a blob of Aim the size of a single grain of corn. Repeating this process daily produced smaller and smaller blobs, but still there were results that could be fully documented. On July 11, convinced that finally nothing but minty air was being pressed out of the tube, I cut it in half and pushed my index finger in manually to scrape out what was left. Success! I actually managed to accumulate enough toothpaste to fully coat my two front teeth. But what I was truly after was hidden within the mouth of the tube, that shadowy no-man’s-land which I suspected held within it unimaginable treasures. After taking leave from Cards ‘N’ Party Outlet and spending the 12th and 13th whittling a pencil-shaped rod which, when pushed through the mouth, would in theory gather up a tangible amount of remaining paste, I took a deep breath and tested my hypothesis. I can’t describe the disappointment I felt when I came up with nothing. Depressed for days because I thought there simply must be more product within that secretive tube, I wandered the streets alone, my mind reeling. Then, by chance, I happened upon a deranged and filthy homeless man who described to me the VX-079 Matter Sweeper and its rich possibilities for excavating the depths of my tube of Aim using a sophisticated process of thermal particle breakdown in which the toothpaste’s invisible subatomic bits would be magnetically drawn into a metal chamber, converted into light, and then re-constituted directly into a test tube. Now all that is left is the challenge of finding a sub-zero degree environment in which to begin the process. All my savings having been spent on renting the Matter Sweeper for three days, this could be tricky. I should go ask my buddy Sal what to do. He knows a lot of stuff.

I should clarify that the Aim I’m talking about is the special cinnamon flavor, not just the normal kind.