The Myth of Wile E

Sisyphus vs. the Spool Table

Sometimes life doesn't give you lemons, or even grapefruits, but I figured life always gave you something for "ade" if you looked around hard enough.

So. I rolled my spool table out of the kitchen, down the hall, out the front door, and around the house to the base of the hill, careful not to run over the newly liberated Long Trailing Zucchini. Now came the hard part.

Pushing the spool table in front of me, I started rolling it up the steep hill. But, barely five feet up the slope, it got stuck in the mud.

I turned around and put my back against the spool table, trying to dig my heels into the squishy mud as I pushed backwards. It wouldn't budge. And to make matters worse, my feet slipped. The spool table came rolling down on top of me, flattening me face-first in the mud as it ran me over.

I peeled myself out of the me-shaped crater I'd left in the base of the hill.

Clearly if I did not change my strategy, this ordeal of rolling something up a hill wasn't going to go any better for me than it did for that Sisyphus guy. I sat in the mud, contemplating the problem.

My first, and most obvious solution, was to wrap a rope around the hub of the spool table, then go up to the top of the hill and give the rope a hard tug, causing the spool table to wind itself up the rope like a giant yo-yo. But I didn't have a long enough rope, and besides, I never did get the hang of that trick with my old Duncan Butterfly.

My second-best solution was—as you might expect—circus performers. We've all seen that trick where circus animals, or acrobats, or clowns, walk around on top of giant balls or wheels. Surely a circus performer could stand on the spool table and run it all the way up the hill with just his feet. Yes, I realize this is easier said than done. For one thing, the circus performer would have to be facing backwards, or else the wheel would not travel in the correct direction. This could make steering difficult. But it was all moot anyway, as I was critically short on circus performers.

I sat and sat, staring at the hill. It sat and sat, staring back at me. Neither of us budged (unless you were to count the Earth below us hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour while also spinning like a top). I was squandering my time-share of daylight, probably much to the annoyance of people in Fiji who were awaiting their turn.

I'm sure the mogul would have Kobayashi-Marued his way out of this problem, getting to the top of the hill not by climbing up the slope, but by flattening the peak. You'd think that in all of eternity, Sisyphus might have thought of that solution, too. But I suppose that's what makes the mogul a mogul, and what makes Sisyphus a has-been who once headlined his own myth and hasn't been heard from since.