Author: Ryan Olejnik

They say the road to becoming a good writer is paved with good intentions, but sometimes, it feels paved with fresh concrete. Take my own journey, for instance. I’ve always dreamed of spinning humorous anecdotes that could light up a room with laughter. Instead, I find myself spinning my wheels in the concrete, waiting for a never-ending red traffic light to change.

Whenever I find a few precious moments for writing, it’s like finally deciding to ditch the car and walk. I don’t get very far before realizing I’m only being fitted for a new pair of concrete sneakers. After trudging through cement for hours, the next thing I know, it’s nighttime, and someone suggests I should sleep with the fishes. I tell them I always wanted a waterbed but suddenly find myself being thrown off the pier instead. I try to make the best of it and ask a clownfish for some good jokes, but he has a dry sense of humor.

When I finally emerge from the briny deep, I decide I’m getting pretty desperate and should perhaps try to take cues from the greats. I recall what Taylor Swift once famously said when she was faced with a blank space, “I’ll write your name.” But whose name do I write? Do I pick a random name from the phonebook and hope for the best? The thought of leaving anyone out fills me with guilt, so I resign myself to the absurd notion of writing down every single name on the planet.

Considering an estimated 8 billion people are in the world, this task suddenly feels less like a whimsical exercise and more like a Herculean feat. Ready to embark on this epic nomenclature journey, I arm myself with a pen because I’ve heard it said the pen is mightier than the sword. Even though I’m pretty sure Hercules was so strong, he had no use for a sword. Either way, I signed myself up for a marathon of biblical proportions.

On average, it takes about three and a half hours to write a modest 8,500 words. Doing some quick math, I realize it would take me roughly 376 years to scribble down all 8 billion names. At this point, I question why I didn’t decide to become a mathematician. But I would probably be in the same boat if I calculated pi by hand.

With a sinking feeling in my gut, probably from all the water I swallowed while sleeping with the fish, I realize the futility of my endeavor. By the time I finish jotting down the last name on my list, a significant portion of those people will have shuffled off this mortal coil, leaving me with a dusty tome of obsolete monikers. And what’s worse, I’ll probably have developed such severe writer’s cramp that I won’t be able to lift a pen, let alone craft the witty anecdotes that inspired this madness in the first place.

With a weary sigh, I set aside my pen and paper, vowing to approach my writing with a newfound sense of pragmatism. Who knows? Maybe one day, I’ll look back on this absurd quest for inspiration and laugh. But for now, I’ll content myself with the knowledge that sometimes, the best anecdotes never get written down.