PINK

I had finished a couple of glasses of wine and thought I should try to see a pink elephant. When I was a kid, drunks seeing pink elephants was a standard cliché. I had no idea where this image came from so I went on-line and found this passage written 100 years ago by Jack London.

"the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants."

Elephants being in short supply I decided to stare at my goldfish and turn it pink.

The fish did not turn pink. Instead, I felt an empathy for the fish swimming in circles in it's bowl, living only for the next sprinkle of fish food.

I did a drawing of the fish, and appropriately, colored it pink. But that did not make me happy. Today I got a bigger tank and three more fish. I even found one that had a flash of pink when the light hit it a certain way.

I can't make the world a better place for everything, but at least, for today, I did not only swim in a circle waiting for my next sprinkle of food.

All very well. But the fish didn't really seem to care one way or the other. I had made it all about me and my misplaced sense of altruism. That realization made me laugh, and laughing made today a good day.
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