In this world of oil and steel…

…man is useful only insofar as he can fan the flames.

One day man stood on his hilltop and looked down at the trees, the sparrows suspended, the mountains in the distance, the waters crashing on shores far away, and he saw everything in the red tint of lust:

“Into what volume of combustible fodder might I transmute those trees?”

“What ores lie beneath those mountains with which I might smite my competitors in lust?”

“How limitless that ocean! Might I dispose of the waste of my endeavor into it?”

“How might I fly like those birds and reach yet other lands pregnant with inventory?”

What was once a green dominion submitted to his humble tenancy became a sandbox glinting with latent pleasures unknown.

The bloodred whispers in his chest intensified, so he climbed down into that narrow valley and set his hands upon the trees. They resisted not his eager grasp; he found them pliable: easy to fell and quick to burn. That same fire he set upon the metals of the mountains above him, malleable, easily melted into blades of steel—to which the necks of his fellow man were likewise pliable.

The blue waters of the ocean, equally deferential, readily accepted the bodies.

He then, looking up at the sparrows, built wings out of water-pressed vegetal matter, climbed back up his hilltop, eyed a distant green land tinted red under the whispers of his chest, and leapt.

Elevated by the smoke of the desolate land he left behind, his wings carried him far.

In this new land, he felled more trees, kindled greater fires, melted finer blades, smote more necks, and—once again—dumped the waste of his handiwork into the inviting blue waters of the ocean.

Looking across the waters, he spotted a yet greener land. His wings, now feeble in his eyes, he shed readily into the waters, and in their place he arrayed the trunks of six saplings, roped them together with vines yanked from the canopy of trees, and pushed off the gray sands with his now metal-clad feet towards the direction of that pregnant island—so red it appeared under his eyes—propelled once again by the smoke and dust of his previous endeavors.

When his feet touched the fine sands of this New Land, he found upon it a mountain emitting a tremendous smoke of its own. The smoke entered his nose and coursed skyward through the veins of his neck; his head felt giddy, his chest heavy.

Up the volcano he strode, and at its peak he found a vast trough of red, the likes of which could melt ore into blades innumerable! How fortuitous—that he was the very first of his brethren to stumble upon this pit of glory!

Out of breath and no longer fit to survey the world’s green landscape, he intended to settle down. So he constructed of melted ore a sort of Productivity Perch—a “Man Cave,” as it were—suspended opportunistically right above that crucible of lava, that little golden reservoir.

Home sweet home.

When his brethren came, he did not wait for them to climb up his blessed crucible to taint it with their dirty feet, to meet them man-to-man, sword-on-sword—for they now had swords of their own! Instead, he lobbed a mass of charged steam, heated fresh in his cauldron, in their general direction. He watched it fly through the air, like those “birds” of a dim past, a mass of red, a star of achievement, of progress, of productivity! And it smote the green grounds—now grey—and the defenseless heads of his brethren.

He smiled, sipped a draught of productivity coffee, took a pen from his desk with gloved hands, and scratched out the title of a new chapter—Collateral Damage—in his (as-of-yet unpublished) self-help book.

That tome grew by the day. For he came to know that, not only did he have to prove his productivity by sword and bomb, but he had also to justify it by word. His children (for he was now happily married), questioned him on the daily:

“Dad, why do you go to sleep so late?”

“Dad, why are you always looking at that little screen?”

“Dad, why don’t we have any friends?”

“Dad, why can’t you play with me—”

“Shut up, you baboons!” He snapped one day. Later regretful, he realized: Better put it in writing, so that they can grow up productive too. He put pen on paper, and the rest was history.

That little self-help bible soon sold-out on shelves worldwide, and the world came to be peppered with many other little Man Caves like his own.

Now famous, he no longer felt inclined to bomb his visitors. As they arrived in droves, winded from pilgrimage to his volcanic apex, and knocked upon the welcoming black door of his mansion of oil and steel, he greeted them with words of wisdom (and autographs to match):

“No pain, no gain!”

“When there’s a will, there’s a way!”

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease!”

“He who laughs first, laughs loudest!”  

“Actions are loud, but words are louder!”

He fielded their questions on the true secrets behind his incredible endurance, his supreme excellence, his matchless productivity, and then, when they finished scrutinizing every nook of his genius mind, he retreated to the deepest, darkest cranny of his mansion, his Man Cave, sat behind his productivity desk, on his productivity chair, upon his sculpted productivity thighs, under the aroma of his productivity coffee, surrounded by the clangs of his productivity machinery and the leering gaze of his productivity calendars and the tick-tock of his productivity clock and the buzz of his unstoppable—truly unstoppable—productivity mind…

And screamed.

The sound raked the air of the tiny volume of his Man Cave, echoed from the perfectly resonant steel walls of his mansion, and thundered into the lava of the Golden Crucible upon which he lived.

It erupted.

…

A single sparrow soaring overhead, the last of its kind, lamented:

If only he hadn’t missed the wood for the trees.