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The implication was to buy the stock.
 How had they gotten so rich? How had they gotten control?
The dark winter wood stacked in a yard.
Not that he believed what they told him, wealthy and powerful though they were, so much as he sensed it, sensed they were right, they had the money which gave them the right to be right, and all they wanted from him, and all he secretly wanted from them.
They were the winners. Because they had been paying attention.
He and people like him had not.
Yet they could save him. If they smiled upon him, he could be saved. Otherwise he might be left behind. And what was left behind was nothing.
Nothing.
He'd spent all his life working on something that was nothing. Worse, it was less than what he'd thought it was. He'd thought it was more -- much, much more -- than nothing.
But it was not.
To know anything was nothing; one had to sell. To sell one had to have product. What had he for product? With no product, one was obviously nothing.
Our language, this language of his country and culture, was used the world over and would continue to be king, and he was doing nothing with this great gift, this terrific advantage, to move himself or anyone he might happen to know forward.
And it was go forward or be left behind, plain as the words that said it.
No one had any interest whatsoever in doing anything for him particularly when he apparently could not be bothered to do anything for himself.
Or not particularly in that case, in any case.
He who wanted to ask a woman her number and hoped to himself -- really hoped -- her number would contain certain numbers which held personal significance for him. It was as though he were not wanting to ask for her number but rather to ask for her numerology -- if such a term could be correctly applied to an entirely personal interpretive valuation.
He was there to sell; he was told he must never forget that. He searched for his product, and they had their cargo cult. Of course their desires were not to be referred to as a cargo cult nor were they to be in any way denigrated. It was about getting the money and everything else was secondary.
He was reminded he was failing to comprehend the definitional point. Once every possible unit of value -- every salable thing -- was defined, it was simply a matter of separation and packaging.
The compartmentalization and commodification of everything our dream -- he knew -- realized at last.
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