“Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.”
Listening to that Tony Robbins motivational tape was an ugly idea. I’d found an old TDK-90 whilst clearing out the basement. As a result, to seize the day, I’d woken up at four o’clock in the morning. I had a cold shower, hyperventilated and did three-hundred pull ups from the roof. The balance was in my favour.
Oil was trading at less than zero. I called Saudi Arabia and asked if they could look after it for me, wire the money and I’d pick the barrels up at a later date. They said sure, so I spent the early hours before dawn trading oil and bitcoin on the dark-web. Sadly, I’d missed out on billions thanks to my broadband provider choking the bandwidth every time I clicked ‘sell’.
By breakfast I’d been awake longer than I had slept.
When Alice asked if she could have my breakfast because she didn’t like hers – even though it was the same as mine – I said yes and subtracted it from my life. Tim Ferris was eating exogenous ketone supplements and hydrogenated animal parts for breakfast. Fasting sounded delicious.
When you don’t eat your brain works on some kind of higher plane, devoid of distraction, switching between a thousand tasks a second like some kind of fighter jet computer, the mind doing cartwheels at Mach 4 and forcing ideas into your cerebrum at 7G. When the shackles of food are removed your brain uses your own body muscle for fuel. You transcend the normal constructs of human mental capacity and barrel into the atmosphere of trillion dollar hedge fund managers and YouTube stars with a billion fans.
I had another cold shower and a twenty second micro-nap as I walked back to the kitchen.
“Alice,” I said as I sat down at the table and poured myself a cup of white tea from a Ming vase. “What did you dream about last night?”
“Monkeys,” she said, dropping a piece of toast on the floor and taking another. “Lots of them climbing on Mommy and Daddy’s head and on the walls and then and then… and then… they jump and there is one and he is more naughty and he takes the banana and the house, which is our house but then isn’t, is a lake and we are swimming in the lake with you and then a dolphin jumps over our head and it turns into Mommy and then we swim and it’s, blue, the water and then we have a picnic and jelly.” She takes a breath, wipes her mouth but has jam all over the back of her hand so just wipes strawberry jam into her eyes and uses the other hand to wipe jam into her hair. “But the picnic, the picnic the picnic… is strange and on a beach and the monkeys come back and they give us the banana which is what I think they wanted to do in the beginning but we went to the lake so they couldn’t.”
“How do you remember so much?”
“Because,” she said, bemused, “I only wake up just then. What did you dream Daddy?”
I said I’d been up for six hours and didn’t really have time to dream. “Do you know why we dream?”
“I dream of animals mostly.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because we don’t have any pets. Mommy, can we get a giraffe? I think if we had a giraffe or a cat or a camel I dream about. I don’t know. I never dream about cake. And we eat cake all the time.”
“Yes, but why do you think we dream?”
“You said you didn’t dream.”
I said I didn’t remember my dreams.
“Dreams are so you have fun when you are asleep. You must be very bored when you’re asleep Daddy.”
After a hearty breakfast of nothing we started on the happiness diary.
“What are you happy about Alice?”
“Look Daddy,” she said, sitting down and putting a foot behind her head. “I can do this.”
Apocalypse Mommy said, “I wish I could do that.”
“I’m happy it was my birthday.”
“It has to be in the last twenty four hours.”
“Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life.”
“Draw it on the board Daddy,” she said. “I’m happy to draw
everrrrrryyyything. And, and, and I’m happy to eat lentils and ice-cream and… and… and snow I love snow. Let it snow, Let it snow, let it snow. Can’t take it back any more. Mommy, can we make a cake later?”
“I can’t fit all of that on the board. Can you summarise it?”
Alice said, “Sun rise?”
“Summarise,” I said. “Make it smaller.”
So she whispered.
“A shorter sentence.”
“Write like a whisper,” she said.
And I was happy for that.