Investing for Nimrods
The hole is my domain; I determine its destiny as its master.
Imagine a hole.
Imagine that this hole is massive. I have no sense of dimensions, so feel free to make up your own. It’s in a field, a clearing amidst a forest, which is itself quite breathtakingly vast—a very long drive from any civilized place.
It—the hole—I can assure you, is huge. Sorry … sorry. The hole is HUUUUUUGE and WIIIIIIDE. Like, if you and a friend or family member or secret lover were standing at diametrically opposite ends of the hole, you could not speak to each other at regular volumes as if you were sitting across from each other at a booth in an empty restaurant. You could not even speak in slightly raised voices if that restaurant was packed for lunch. You would each have to yell your personal endearments and other relevant information (pin numbers, passwords, secret third nipples, whatever) at the top of your lungs as if … as if you were standing across from each other over a large hole surrounded by natural splendor.
I should also add that the hole is deep. (DEEEEEEP.) How deep? Wouldn’t you like to know? Actually I have no idea exactly how deep it is, but it is of sufficient depth that if you look down into it, you see only blackness. It suffocates all light not too far beneath the edge. I appreciate this aspect about it. It’s like a painting of a pitch black dot left incomplete by the artist’s death. The hole should have an air of mystery to it that borders on, but does not quite cross over into, the horrific. Holes are not great investments without some sort of mystique.
I guess now is a good time to add that I own this hole that I am making you imagine.
You might ask, How did you come into the possession of this hole? You’ll find the answer is quite simple: with money, you nimrod. I would be setting myself up for embarrassment if I went to the seller of the hole with, I don’t know, an equivalent of the price I paid for it in Peeps rather than legitimate US dollars. No, I came into a great deal of money; more, presumably, than I knew what to do with, having no debts or other burdensome expenses. So, like a total gaywad, I opened up the New York Times real estate section, just to sort of feel things out, and there it was:
HOLE, Bumblefuck, CT or RI or NH or whogivesashit, USA. X00 or so ft. in circumference. TBD in depth. New. Dynamic. Multifaceted. Distance from any major city or top-rated schools: SIGNIFICANT. Starting price: $X50,000.00.
Imagine that you are me reading this imaginary real estate listing for this imaginary hole. I defy you to tell me that you wouldn’t feel the same (imaginary) temptation to jettison your hard-earned money into the hole-based economy. Like you have any better ideas? Imagine that I’m pretty smart and have tons of good ideas; but imagine that from the time I saw the listing to the time I signed the deed, they were conspicuously absent.
Once the hole was officially in my possession, I spent untold days gazing upon its immense, barely describable sublimity. I lost so much time just lying on my side stroking its mossy edges. Sometimes I would bring a tent and sleeping bag and camp beside it. Had I not owned the hole, I would have been afraid to do any of these things. I can’t trust what I don’t possess. But the hole is my domain; I determine its destiny as its master. But I could not stroke its mossy edges in perpetuity, though I was in my right to do so. My most important determination of its destiny: making the hole deeper.
Whatever its depth was at the time of purchase—and no one could give me even a broad estimate, as if that, too, would ruin it—I thought it was insufficient for my investment. So I did what any self-respecting owner of a thing would do. I hired a crew of the ablest workers in surveying and digging and sent them into it. That was about five months ago, so you can only imagine me imagining the progress they’ve made.
Imagine me sitting in a folding lawn chair a few feet from the edge of the hole, drinking bottle after bottle of hard root beer. Imagine me brainstorming. Imagine that I am thinking of other things that can be done to or around the hole once it has reached a depth that satisfies me. Imagine me keeping a small pad of paper handy for my ideas.
Some ideas might include building a thin but sturdy bridge to go down the middle of it. People could stand right over its impenetrable depths and be brought to tears by it. Men could propose to their girlfriends on it, or to a Polaroid of their pickup truck for all I care. They could rent time over the hole to have the engagement photos taken there. I could make the bridge somewhat wider for birthday parties, cocktail receptions, informative lectures. I could also put those telescope things you find on observation decks or at the ends of piers so people could look even deeper into its blackness. I could hook up speakers and play Sunn O))) or Gregorian chant or Enya depending on the desired mood. I could erect a bench where my lawn chair is and allow people to contemplate the hole’s significance and appreciate my philanthropic largesse.
I am more certain that whatever I end up doing I must hire security to protect the hole from being abused or defiled. Imagine me lying sleepless knowing that there are people out there—disturbed and rotten people poorly instructed in morals—who think only low thoughts about the hole. They care nothing of the financial commitment I’ve made to bringing out the greatest potential of the hole; they care only how the hole can gratify them, how it can restore their own emptiness. Fucking perverts. They can get their own goddamn holes at whatever size they wish or can afford and do God only knows what they wish to do.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. None of what I’ve projected is in place, not even security or some kind of restrictive fencing. There’s only you and the hole. Now it is I who am imagining you. I imagine you to be of decent enough character, who appreciates the immensity of experience and experiencing immense things. I don’t know how you found out about the hole—maybe you heard about it on Atlas Obscura or you just found it—but you were drawn to it anyway, and having arrived at it, you find it is all you require in this very moment. It is your everything. It carries a certain authority that is and was always absent from your life. I am imagining you imagining being berated by your middle school guidance counselor and imagining that your middle school guidance counselor is the hole, whose counsel is eloquent, sagacious, unquestionable.
I imagine you imagining yourself standing there forever in uninterrupted rapture that only you and no one else can comprehend—not even I can. And that’s great for you, really. But you’re not the owner of the hole.
Imagine that you’re on property that isn’t yours and that its rightful owner is standing in the back of a fast-approaching jeep, armed with a crossbow. Imagine that, mind you, I have not yet learned how to shoot the crossbow, but owning a hole isn’t all that exciting, so I take what I can get.