“The only difference between fame and fortune is three letters—and they aren’t SEX. You see, any animal can get laid if they have a pulse. But some animals are wounded—not for lack of sex, but because they are undesirable when wounded by their own kind. If they are wounded by a great predator for being in the wrong place at the wrong time—either looking for sex in the wrong place, or too eager to feed their young or themselves to get big for the upcoming winter—they have only done one desirable thing to encounter such a fate.
Animals that are wounded are not fuckable because their clock is ticking.”
Eric wanted to look at his bare wrist just then, which bore no watch, but it may have shown his PC (personal companion) that he hadn’t yet crossed into scary territory—territory ruled by male predators who want to steal his food and his wife. Because he is already wounded by the three letters that are the difference between fame and fortune.
As if his PC didn’t already know those three letters—and that the three letters are different for everybody, and may not spell anything at all, if they’re lucky.
Fame and fortune is as prevalent as a four-letter word in a zoo.
Eric has been wounded by none other than the word DOG.
The word that is God spelled backwards—or man’s best friend. You would think the infamous three-letter word would have been ego, sin, or war—maybe art, joy, or even God himself. But those are human traits and ideas—well, except for God. And even then, only to some.
Human traits are not what separate fame from fortune.
What does separate the two is the ability to gain one without the other—but only by help from dogs.
“There is a dog in each one of us, Eric. How does that three-letter word make you unique enough to cause you harm? And how does being wounded by it separate fame from fortune?”
The PC didn’t know yet what Eric would say—as it already knows everything Eric has ever said, and can also predict the next words that will vibrate from his larynx, like fungus knows the footsteps and intentions of a hungry animal and warns the plants.
But this time, fungus has no chance of alerting grubs of a hungry bird.
“I am only unique in the eyes of a dog,” Eric said. “It isn’t the dog in me that would have me bite a predator that threatens the instincts for my genes to proliferate. Rather, it is the human animal inside of me. The dog sees me as human. The dog does not see the dog in me—or the humanity inside itself.”
Eric wanted to understand the human animal more—and forget about the dog.
“What I am defending is my reputation, not my property. Is this a sin?
What I am protecting isn’t my property, but my devotion to survive my own errors. Is this my ego?
What my property represents is my instinct to enforce limits upon how much I can afford to lose. Is this war?”
Eric realized, very recently, that fortune is a human construct that measures the reputation one has for protecting their property.
Eric wanted to forget the three-letter word.
But he was getting closer to fame in spelling it out for his PC.
Francis Erich McElroy 