The Nihilist Ice Cream Parlour

Delightfully, the good folks over at Village Wit have published a short story of mine called The Nihilist Ice Cream Parlour. Check it out!

For those who’re interested, the concept came from a night out with philosophers – the night of this conversation, actually – after Zach posited the idea of a nihilist ice cream vendor. Everyone, naturally, thought it was hilarious, and I vowed on the spot to write a short story about it. Zach agreed, but not before making me promise to give him joint credit. I accepted. On we went.

A few days later, I found myself with a free half hour at work. I thought about nihilist ice cream, grinned, and wrote the first version (850 words long – the published iteration, due to submission guidelines, is 700)  in about twenty minutes. I printed it out, and, as it was a Friday, proceeded to the Melbourne Uni postgradute philosophy room to join my Long-Suffering Husband. Zach was also there. With a triumphant flourish, I dropped the finished article on his lap. He read it. I waited.

After about a minute, he looked up.

‘Foz?’ he asked. ‘I don’t get it. I mean, I get it, I just don’t get why.’

Turns out, he’d forgotten the entire conversation, as had almost everyone else. So in a way, the story is my reward for not ending up utterly drunk that night.

It’s like an After School Special come true.

Ivory Towers, And So Forth

The following is an abridged transcript of a conversation which took place earlier tonight in a dumpling house off Lonsdale Street, and is one consequence of drunken philosophers trying to discuss environmentalism. It went like this:

Toby: So, global warming. Why don’t we just move the planet? You know, figure the maths out –

Zach: I thought you hated metrics?

Toby: Shut up!

Dave: Move the planet! We could build rockets, push it along –

Ole: Yeah!

Me: But, I mean, isn’t Earth an M-type planet? Don’t we occupy –

Toby: “M-type” planet? What the hell? Isn’t that a Star Trek term?

Me: No, it’s a legitimate science term which just happens to get used in shows like Star Trek.

Toby: Right.

Me: Shut up! I’m serious. We occupy a small belt in space, right, because we’re just far enough away from the sun not to burn, but close enough not to freeze.

Ole: What, and what happens if we get too far away?

Me: We turn into Venus.

Dave: Venus is closer!

Me: Mars, then.

Zach: OK, fine, but we’re moving the planet. I mean, if we could make the year 500 days long, right, we could have ten day weeks, go decimal –

Toby: I thought you hated arithmetic?

Zach: Shut up! 

Dave: So global warming is solved.

Ole: But, hang on, if we move the planet, won’t the moon crash into us?

Dave: No, no! The moon’ll come with, won’t it? Right?

Zach: Well, either way, it’s still coming with us. It might just, you know, be part of us.

Toby: If it explodes, we could have two.

Zach: Right! So we blow up the moon first.

Ole: So it can’t crash into us!

Dave: Yes! This is the new plan, then. Step one: blow up the moon. Step two: move the planet.

Me: Moving the planet. They did that on Futurama once, with robots.

Ole: And everything on Futurama is automatically brilliant.

Toby: Isn’t that a documentary? I’m pretty sure it is.

Dave: They didn’t blow up the moon, though.

Zach: You know, those damn Jehova’s Witnesses, they keep on saying how great it would be if the moon were invisible, how it would solve all their problems, and I’m like, “Dude. But it’d still be there.” Unfortunately, though, they’ve got a huge voting constituency. Bastards.

Me: I guess they took that song It’s Only A Paper Moon a bit too literally.

Zach: Yeah.

And thus, we saved the world.