I had a vision of myself riding side-saddle on a plain brown horse charging into Napoleon’s army. I was feeling as flat as dead balloons and was only fighting as a form of distraction from scratching mosquito bites. Napoleon’s army was fierce and I, after catching the cruel end of a bayonet in the pupil of my eye, discovered first hand the futility of doing battle when blasé. With my unbayonetted eye I spied my other eyeball dislodged, liberated from its maternal socket, spiraling in front of my plain brown horse, and becoming a lazy drowsy planet. To their horror the eyeballs possessed by Napoleon’s military all quit their maternal sockets and became orbiting moons for my eyeball turned lazy drowsy planet. The moons (former eyeballs) politely and pathetically described circles around this new planet as the course of their orbits dictated. Mistaking the moons (which were prepubescent) for egret eggs a dimwitted serpent swallowed them and became gassy. His flatulence produced a new exciting fragrance foreign to the noses of me and Napoleon’s blind military. We all agreed it was highly marketable and followed the serpent as he slithered around, feeling bloated, capturing his sweet gaseous discharges in an airtight plastic bag. Once we had enough to secure all of our fortunes we left the serpent to do its gastrical suffering in a thorny bush and made a bee line to the “Factory Of All Things Lucrative And Vendable”.

After thoroughly greasing the palms and then the underarms of the Manager and his assistants we began the production and marketing of our new eau de toilet. We quarreled for days over what to name it and finally settled on not naming it. This, as it would turn out, was an inspired decision because it cast an air of mystery on our product which the upper class fops, whom we were hoping to pander to, found irresistible.

As it could have been predicted the dispersion of the profits was an impossible task with each person feeling they deserved more than they were given and squabbling over the most negligible of sums. It seemed our little enterprise was going to derail before reaching its full monetary potential. Just when the situation appeared most dire a very peculiar thing occurred. The Sun, which for many years had worn a fur, began springing leaks. Since the entire French army of Napoleon’s was handicapped by blindness the responsibility rested solely on the nation’s artists to devise a solution to the impending solar crisis.

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