I had a dream that it was my birthday. I decided that what I wanted for my birthday was to get married and take a honeymoon tip to the actual moon! To this end, I built a rocket ship capable of taking two people to the moon, and I posted an invitation on my myspace: come marry me for my birthday and get a trip to the moon! So confident was I that this would work that I actually sent out invitations to my wedding, as though it were set in stone.

In boasting about my rocket that I built, I attracted some attention. Not the “Hey, let’s get married and fly to the moon” type of attention. More like, “I see that you are a powerful and capable person. Would you like to join our evil organization?” type of attention.

The evil organization told me that they had plans to steal these ancient, sacred Mayan artifacts that were said to have great power. I turned down (and told off!) the evil organization.

Then I had two simultaneous thoughts: 1) I must prevent them from getting those powerful artifacts. 2) Those powerful artifacts would totally help me be successful in my rocket launch. I mean, heck. I’ve never launched a rocket before. I haven’t run any tests. And I don’t have the money to launch a test rocket. It took up all my money to just get this rocket ready to launch. If I had ancient, powerful, magical artifacts, I could “fudge” things a little if they start to go wrong.

So I discovered where the ancient Mayan artifacts were.

Embarassingly, they were at a plain ol’ Mayan community affairs center. Now I felt like a huge dick for stealing stuff from the Mayans. Sure, dig up some forgotten artifact somewhere, that doesn’t feel like stealing. But this? Well, I rationalized it by saying that I was stealing it to prevent the bad guys from stealing it. I would return it when I was done; they wouldn’t have.

So I pried up one of the bricks on the walk into the building. You know, the bricks that have engraved on them the names of people who donated to make the building possible? They also had carvings on them that were replicas of ones from famous old Mayan temples and stuff. The one that had a certain picture on it, that was where the magic artifacts were buried.

I found it there. It was a pouch. It had some intricately carved sticks painted in vivid colors, and some precious stones. When the stone was combined with the corresponding stick, the magic would start.

I found that the orange stick combined with the garnet would make a blinding light. The green stick combined with the jade would make me able to jump higher (like, I could do a standing jump up to five feet in the air). The blue stick combined with the sapphire could make me able to run faster. Not, like, Olympics fast, but respectable fast.

Overall, not a terribly impressive magic power.

And you know why? Because these weren’t even real gemstones! (I assume) white people had been stealing this sacred ancient artifact from them an awful lot. The location of it was not a very well-kept secret. But, of course, tradition dictated that they must keep it buried under that stone. So when it got stolen, they would replace it, and replace it, and replace it. But the cost of replacing it got to be so high that they had to start replacing the components with cheaper things that barely satisfied the requirements.

For example, the gold? It was no longer a gold nugget. It was a piece of gold-colored wrapping paper that presumably used a tiny bit of actual gold in the coloring.

The granite? It was a promotional casino token paperweight that was made out of granite and had the name of the casino.

Presumably, if I got the “real” gemstones and had them sanctified in the same way, I could get the full power out of these things.

Whatever. This would do to get it out of the hands of the evil organization, and probably even to make my rocket work. Let’s check my myspace and see if anybody replied.

Nope! No takers. God damn it. Well, heck. I’m not going to risk my life on an experimental rocket all by myself. I disappointed my wedding guests by telling them that there would be no wedding, but told them that we could watch the rocket launch instead. I stuck a videocamera in the capsule and launched the thing. Whoop-dee-frickin’-doo.