At night in its room a hamster stared at a book by an author who had died. ‘What if I died?’ the hamster thought a little confused. The hamster had not yet met its hamster friend. The hamster was alone. It was an urban variety of a rare species of vegan hamster. Its room was small.
It had stacks of stolen books. The hamster had organic green tea extract that was stolen.
The hamster’s toothpaste was stolen and it used stolen flaxseed lemon soap on its hair, which it cut itself. The hamster had an eleven-dollar toothbrush.
The hamster lived in a large city. Some days it felt terrible, then realised while walking that it didn’t feel terrible, but very good, and then felt relieved and consoled for the rest of the day until it went to sleep, though most other days after a few hours everything outside its head became a single unit of experience that entered its head—which was also its body—and then included its head, creating a single mass which the hamster carried home and laid on a pillow.
The hamster’s pillow was made of goose feathers. The hamster found it in the refuge room.
The hamster’s philosophy of life sometimes included rather than was dictated by veganism. If the hamster saw clean, leftover meat in the garbage it would process its choices—to eat it or not eat it —and in most circumstances eat it, so that later on it would not require as many resources to continue to exist and so could spend more money on things that would increase the life-span of other organisms while also reducing pain and suffering in the world.
The hamster conceived this philosophy by observing that it did not commit suicide. The hamster thought, ‘I am perpetuating a conscious state of being by eating and breathing and thinking and not slitting my wrists, therefore my philosophy—derived from my actions, which are pre-philosophical, or something—is that I want to live, that all conscious beings not working towards or in the act of suicide also want to live, and that I should therefore behave in a way that allows the most organisms the most life.’
The hamster sometimes thought about war, politics, globalisation, and world trade but mostly about things like death, writing, existence, loneliness, and meaninglessness that—despite its philosophy regarding the value of life—often, to it, preempted economy, capitalism, society, and materialism. The hamster lived in Manhattan. Later it moved to Florida then, to be near its hamster friend, Pennsylvania. It had read over three hundred books of literary fiction, including almost all of Jean Rhys, Lydia Davis, Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore, and Richard Yates.
One night the hamster read a book that said HIV probably wasn’t the cause of AIDS. The hamster told three other hamsters that HIV probably wasn’t the cause of AIDS and two of the hamsters got angry at it.
An angry hamster looks exactly like an unangry hamster, because the anger is within.
The hamster was unemployed. It stole from Whole Foods and other grocery stores and Virgin Megastore.
Each day the hamster walked in stores, put items in a black duffel bag, walked out of stores, and ate the items walking around. If the items were books it didn’t eat them. It read them, sold them to used bookstores, or mailed them to hamsters it knew from the Internet. The hamster eventually consumed, sold on eBay, or gave away over $15,000 worth of stolen goods. It said to another hamster, ‘You have to be retarded to be caught stealing.’ Later the hamster was caught stealing and banned for life from Whole Foods. The hamster stole only from publicly-traded companies.
The function of a publicly-traded company is to increase its worth so that stockholders will have more money now than before. A publicly-traded company must increase profits or convince the hamster population that profits will increase soon or else it will exist less, then not exist.
When one publicly-traded company loses business another publicly-traded company gains business, except when an independently-owned company gains the business.
An independently-owned company is not existentially required to increase profits but can use profits to increase wages, improve quality, lower prices, fund charities, or institute money-losing but socially-beneficial programs as ends in themselves rather than means for increasing profits.
Outside a 24-hour grocery store a homeless hamster lied to the hamster four times, each time gaining twenty to thirty dollars.
After the second lie the hamster said, ‘Are you lying to me?’ The homeless hamster said it was not. The homeless hamster talked about Christianity. The hamster listened politely and gave twenty dollars to the homeless hamster and the homeless hamster danced into an alleyway, becoming smaller as it got further away from the hamster, who liked what was happening, partly because the dance was a jig.
The third lie the homeless hamster said to the hamster was that it had a kidney infection from eating out of the trash. It said it pissed blood. ‘What happened?’ the hamster said, and stared at the homeless hamster. The homeless hamster was silent. The homeless hamster said it was cured. It said they put a needle into its kidney and took out the poison, and that it needed money to have residence for one week, so that it could get a job.
The homeless hamster moved very fast the fourth time and said it had eight years training of a kind of martial arts. The hamster nodded. The homeless hamster very quickly turned away from the hamster then turned back suddenly with a face that displayed no discernible emotion and no discernible lack of emotion.
The hamster was impressed a little and thought briefly about how it was very well nourished and ate mostly only organic foods but felt like it could not move nearly as fast as the homeless hamster just did.
‘You look strong,’ the hamster said.
There was another homeless hamster the hamster had given a dollar to, about two minutes earlier, and the homeless hamster with martial arts said, ‘Do you want me to jump him?’ The hamster said not to jump the other homeless hamster, who had a beard.
The bearded hamster was very tall and large and stood about thirty-feet away. It wore a large black trench coat and had a facial expression like it just woke from twelve hours of sleep and didn’t know where it was. The hamster had seen the homeless hamster with the beard many times before and it always had that expression.