There was once a man who lived in a house he had inherited. Since he planned to stay there the rest of his life, he decided to fix it up – MAKE IMPROVEMENTS. But he discovered the totally unexpected: the structure could not be altered.
Oh, he could make a change at a certain spot, but as soon as he walked away, or even just looked away from the change – it disappeared, and everything went back to like it’d been.
For a long time this troubled the man with the house, ’til he finally saw the situation like this: “I inherited the place, and during the first years of my living here, I was delighted with it; then I began to find fault with it, and tried to change it to suit a taste that had inexplicably appeared in me, which differed from the reality of the previously cherished residence. I found that no efforts to this end resulted in permanent change to the structure; it’s still just like it was when I first moved in – a few years older – but basically unchanged.”
He now has a new hobby: he ponders the meaning of, “Improvement.”
P.S. There is no such time as: “There was once…”
…hand me a cold one.
J.