Apocarteresis (a-po-car-ter’-e-sis): Casting of all hope away from one thing and placing it on another source altogether.
Rubik’s Cube. Its popularity took off like a jumbo jet from a golden runway. Everybody had one. Twisting. Twisting. Twisting. People couldn’t stop—it was like they were on a treadmill set somehow beyond the speed of sound, plastic almost melting, twisting colored segments in a blur. People started getting wrist injuries, having marital problems, becoming agoraphobes, and losing their jobs for lack of attendance and playing with their Rubik’s Cubes on the job, either blatantly at their work stations, or in the restroom. One bus driver drove off a bridge. Thank God his bus was empty! Too bad for the driver.
All this and more led to the Rubik’s cube’s declining popularity. They sat on the shelves, unpurchased. They were selling for pennies on the dollar at wholesale venues. I had just taken a course in entrepreneurism at Trump University and was ready to make some fast cash according to what I had learned. Buy cheap, sell high. I invested everything I had in discounted Rubik’s Cubes, believing they would make a quick comeback.
My garage was filled to the rafters with them. I rented a warehouse that was filled too. I sat on them for years while I continued work at CVS and hope. But the Cubes were going nowhere: I couldn’t unload them for my cost. I just didn’t see the handwriting on the wall when I cornered the market. All I could see was “buy cheap, sell high.” Finally, after weeks of anguishing, I decided to do something: to stop waiting for something that would never happen. But what would I do?
It was time to turn my pain into gain—to break from past, sitting on the cubes like they were going to hatch. Staying up late, hardly eating, working like a dog, I determined by experimenting that if you Superglue Rubik’s Cubes together in just the right way, you can make them into lamps, footstools, picture frames, bars, headboards, dining room tables, and even couches.
My attempt at making my first couch ended in disaster. I spilled an entire jumbo-sized tube of Superglue all over my hand and then went to pick up the sofa I was finishing. My entire hand bonded to the couch’s underside. Me and the couch had to go to the emergency room together in a panel truck. They joked about amputating my hand. That made me mad. Anyway, they got my hand unglued with solvent. I told them I would give them the Rubik’s Couch—my first couch—for all of their help. All the staff laughed at me, and the chief nurse told me to “get that ridiculous piece of crap out of here.” I took a cab to U-Haul, drove back to the hospital, and paid a couple of orderlies to help me load my Rubik’s Couch. When I got home, I pulled the couch out of the back of the U-Haul and dragged it into the garage.
Then it happened!
Lady Gaga and Jimmy Carter endorsed my Rubik’s Furniture. Sales went crazy. I have hired 10 glue-men to assemble the furniture. I own most of the world’s Rubik’s Cubes, so I’m set. “Ruby-Cubey-Doo” is one of the most successful furniture businesses in the word, selling 500,000 Rubik units per year. I am rich.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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