Genie In A Bottle

So there’s this genie. And his trying to teach this kid a lesson, so he gives him seven tasks. For the first task he says, “See that mountain over there? The one with the river in the valley below? Here, take this teaspoon, and move the mountain from one side of the river to the other.”

You know, he’s totally expecting the kid to scoop up a teaspoon of dirt from the mountain, wade across the river, dump it, and do it again. Eventually, he figures, the kid’ll give up.

But the kid walks upstream just a little bit and finds a dam. He finds a crack in the dam where just a little bit of water is sneaking through and he jams the teaspoon in there. Eventually, he wiggles that crack into a deluge of water until he’s redirected the entire river around the mountain.

I’m not entirely sure what the moral of this fable is, but as my old friend Joe Smith, a terrific writer, actor, and storyteller, shared it with me this afternoon, something in me stirred.

‘The kid’s onto something,’ I thought.

And so it is that another day in Los Angeles passes.