Tales From The Lebowskis - Almost Made Me Wish I Was Dead!

This'll be a super short one, just something kinda funny I thought of.

When I was little, maybe 6 or so, I had a toy set called Playskool Pipeworks that I LOVED. I think I had the the Pipeworks 2000: Big Builders Set. Basically it was a set of white tubes and connector pieces that you'd use to make appropriate child-size furniture, forts, wheelbarrows, etc. It was fantastic. The instruction manual was the same for the 1000, 2000, and 3000 sets, and I was always wishing I had the parts to build the items that were in the 3000 set only. Pipeworks 3000 reached this mythic status in my young brain, a Holy Grail of toys.

Now, I was raised more-or-less Catholic by my parents, Steven and Diane Thirty, in that I attended CCD weekly, but usually didn't actually go to mass. I did eventually go to a Catholic high school. My parents, they're both Catholic, but in a pretty loose sense of the word, not like Nonnie (the late and very missed Mary Lebowski), who I think would've fought the Python at Delphi to get to church if she had to (and she, like Indiana Jones, hated snakes). In any event, at a young age I fully believed in such concepts as Heaven, Hell, angels, demons, etc... although I tended to imagine them in whatever way seemed fun or interesting to me, Catholic dogma be damned. (It was only a hop, skip, and jump to full blown apostasy and agnosticism! What up, present day?)

I remember more or less vividly a conversation I once had with my beloved uncle Hulka at that young age. I was curious about Heaven, just what it was like. I figured Hulka knew a lot of things, maybe he knew what was so great about this Heaven place. He told me that anything I ever wanted and anyone I ever loved was there. That sounded pretty good, but I needed to know more.

"Hulka, do they have Pipeworks in Heaven?"

"If you like Pipeworks, they have Pipeworks."

Whoa.

"Hulka! Hulka! Do they have Pipeworks 3000!?"

I was totally unprepared for what would come next.

"Remus, they have Pipeworks 1,000,000."

I think my brain exploded. Could. Not. Process. The. Awesome. I couldn't do this math in my head then, but Hulka, in a sentence, in an INSTANT, took the greatest thing I could imagine and improved it by 33,233.33%. That is a return on investment you don't often see, my friends.