A man got tired of walking around.  “There must be an easier mode of locomotion,” he mused aloud.  Being a rather handy man, a tinkerer by trade, of bits and pieces and parts of things, he had accumulated over time a large variety of tools and accoutrements and ends and odds off a thousand other things; wheels off carriages, metal pieces off machinery, nuts and bolts and parts and gears and springs and all the ephemera and perifera that came with such junk out back of his house in his large barn and outbuildings.  Standing out amid his huge junkpile which resembled nothing so much as the external manifestation of his disorderly mind, he decided to keep it very, very simple and build a pair of roller skates like those he had had as a little child.  It seemed a nice little project that he thought he could easily conclude in an hour or two just from the random stuff he had laying around.
    Sure enough in a couple of hours he had some skates.  It had all come together very easily.  So easily that he decided that maybe he’d elaborate and make it a skate board instead by putting the two skates end to end and fastening a board onto the top of them.  This he quickly accomplished.  But after playing with this for awhile, short of finding a perfectly smooth surface and ideal slope, he had trouble getting it to roll properly for any length of time.  Besides, except when it came to unproductive matters, he was a very lazy man, his industry being essentially disindustriously applied, and it seemed a lot of work to push the thing along with first one foot and then the other.  After a while he developed a cramp in his instep and a knot in his calf.  Dissatisfied, thinking that this would not do, he suddenly had another brainstorm.
    Maybe he should turn what he had already built into a bicycle instead?  This idea pleased him enormously.  Besides, his roller skate/skate board had gone together so nice and easily that he had found it rather fun.  How much more difficult could a bicycle be and how much more fun?  Hardly more difficult at all but much more fun, he convinced himself after first proposing the proposition with which he then readily concurred.  But by then it was dinner time so he would have to start again first thing in the morning to build his bicycle.
    The second day things also went quite expeditiously for the off-handed inventor.  And what fun it was.  By the afternoon, after tinkering around all morning, he finally had fashioned something that he fancied almost looked like a bicycle.  It had a seat of sorts, connected by elaborate strut works and had a kind of off center handle bar, all constructed atop his original roller skate board he had started with.  It looked a little funny, to be sure, but he was proud of it all the same and was enthusiastic about the way the whole thing had seemed to come together almost by itself.  But isn’t this often the way of things with people who only do things appropriate to their own predilections?  As if in tribute, to symbolize how charmed he was at the entire adventure, in a moment of whimsy he fastened a little child’s red bell on the handle bar to mark his achievement.
    But when he tried to ride it around it was actually a little bit unstable, all whopper jawed it was, yawing a little to the right then leaning a little to the left.  But that was no big problem, he concluded, just a little fine tuning was all he needed to get the thing, his roller skate board bicycle creation, running just right.  That was something he could do that very next day.
    Next day he added larger wheels to his roller skate board bike which he thought might stabilize it better.  As was his normal way of doing things he never took off things which he had previously put on and had just rendered obsolete with his newest additions.  Instead he merely added to his past efforts, worked over and around the old parts as he affixed the new ones to the old superstructure.  He did things this way so it would seem as if he was always making progress rather than just correcting mistakes.  To his mind taking things away was backward looking movement and a waste of time for a forward looking individual such as he imagined himself to be.  Unfortunately, since these wheels he had just put on were not quite a matched set, they were of different size and to compensate he had to make one end of the bike bigger than the other.  
    Still, standing back to gaze admiringly at his day’s handiwork, he couldn’t be prouder if he’d just given birth!  He just wanted to bust for joy.  Regarding the ungainly looking apparatus before him he could barely contain a grin at what he had wrought.  But then oftentimes the enjoyment of the work in which one has been long engaged may color the opinion of a builder as he beholds the chaos he has created.  That’s why building something and approving it are often jobs allotted to separate individuals.
   But after all, say what you disbelievers will, for his labors he had a roller skate board bike with a seat, handle bar and a little red bell!  What could be nicer than that?  However, he had saved the peddles and the chain to connect to the tires to make it go fast for last and when he tried to get the apparatus to work he encountered a series of unexpected difficulties with ball bearings and such and again had to leave off finishing his project until the next day.  
   Next day, he found the construction of the pedal, gear and chain system much more problematic than he had anticipated.  Even so, he had nearly finished surmounting this latest set of difficulties and needed just a few extra parts to complete the project.  It was while he was looking through his junk pile for the necessaries to construct just these few final pieces of his puzzle that he was struck like lightening with yet another illuminating idea. 
   There among the junk and rubble he espied an old engine.  Why not, he thought, build a motor bike?  The brilliance of the concept simply took his breath away.  A motor propelled vehicle would be even less work to ride.  He was so ecstatic he could barely stand upright.  The path of least mental resistance, of course, as many people know, even when it really requires more physical work, is the law which often leads certain types of weak minded women and men further down the road into greater complications.  But he didn’t know this law and so he spent the rest of the day gathering parts for his new motor bike.
   Then on the seventh day was a complete day of rest.  He was proud of what he had created.  He saw that it was good. Sure, the roller skate project that was to take an hour or two tops had consumed an entire week.  The motor bike plan would consume at least another week in addition to that.  It was more trouble than he’d expected, to be sure, but what the heck, it would be worth it when he was sitting astride his own home made motor bike.
    But next day when he examined this engine more closely he discovered it was actually parts of and pieces and bits of several different styles and manufactures of engines. He was undeterred by such small matters, problems were only pittances to a big thinker like himself because he was the type of man who, once wedded to a plan in his head, never desisted from it until a grander one had arisen to replace it.  Therefore he thought it would be no problem to creatively combine these engines by taking some parts from one and some from the other, then build a new housing around them and bolt the whole thing together on a new block.  Then with reciprocal gears and belts and pulleys he could get the hybrid motors to work and mount the entire structure atop his roller skate board bike.  
    To handle the added weight of the motor he decided to add another wheel for additional support and thus made it more of a roller skate board tricycle.  But as he continued to rummage away through his junk pile for parts, which never seemed to diminish in size no matter how much he removed from it, he stumbled on yet another wheel.  This wheel was really in much better condition than any of the other wheels he had already used.  If necessity really is the mother of invention then chance is its father.  So he decided he really needed to incorporate this wheel somewhere on his roller skate board trike, too, but where?  
   Then it hit him again, or rather he hit himself, slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand, which left a large palm shaped grease spot on his forehead.  With this fourth wheel he realized he could actually turn his motor bike into an actual automobile.  A car!  He should have thought of this before.  That night he dreamed about how elegant he would look driving down the roadway in his very own roller skate board double motor bike automobile.  He already had the engines, the block, the seats, the struts, the belts, the wheels and the little red bell.  The rest should be easy.
    Now as it turned out all this messing around with these hybrid engines and blocks and belts and wheels and pistons and points and carburetors and distributors, alternators, batteries and generators had been a little more time consuming than he had anticipated.  Another month had passed.  But that was alright, he was exceedingly proud of all that he had accomplished, all the moving parts he had assembled, all the pieces he had put together with his own bare hands, either with nuts in bolts or welded with an acetylene torch.  It was all so good, so active, so ingenious, so interconnected, so thoroughly and absorbingly productive an activity that he knew it must be right to have kept so busy and expended so much energy.  
   It was all enterprise and activity in itself which enthralled him.  Some people wasted energy with nothing to show for it.  But the end product of all his hard work and ingenuity was obvious.  Just give him a few months more and he was sure he would have a splendid motor car sitting before him that he could sit in.  
    Of course, this greater ambition entailed other problems as well.  If it was to be a motor car it needed the accoutrements of a car, more convenience and luxury would be needed all around.  Sides and a floor board were certainly needed for such an elegant vehicle, at least for his feet to rest on and for a more commodious place to rest his joints.  To accomplish the latter he cut out an old barrel and filled it with cushions and situated it right in the middle on top of the old bicycle seat behind the handle bars on which he fastened a steering wheel and called it a bucket seat.  He salvaged a real car front windshield from out of his pile of junk and placed it above the handle bars.  He was careful while he did this to keep his little red dingle bell right where it was.  
   On one side of the “car’s” interior he even put together a real working side window which he could roll up and down.  He was so pleased that this actually worked that he actually wasted the better part of one whole afternoon gleefully rolling it up and down in complete blissful satisfaction at his heretofore unexpected and unknown window construction prowess.
    The difficulty was, try as he might to get the thing to drive properly, this spindly collection of nearly unconnected moving parts, he couldn’t get all its gears to quite move in synchronization with its own transmission.  Since the wheels were of different sizes and his axle technology left something to be desired it drove very, very rough.  His drive shaft too, seemed to be just a little bent which caused the car to permanently veer in the opposite direction away from the one in which he steered it.  He decided that marvelous as the vehicle looked, engineering excellence and design (as well as beauty) being in the eye of the beholder, when the rubber tires actually hit the road, his magnificent machine didn’t really run too well.
    Now an ordinary thinking man might have rethought the entire operation, despaired and started over, or have maybe even quit all together, but he was no ordinary thinker.  He was no ordinary man.  He was a bold visionary.  This is what finally led him to look away from the complications of the gravitational pull of our all too solid and mortal earth to the purity, the placidity and the majesty of the open air, to the unimpeded felicity of empty blue sky, where the imagination might run free of these petty earthly constraints of space and time, and float to the very infinity of heaven.  Yes he looked to the sky where all thoughts are unobstructed and he thought of wings.  Wings?  Yes Wings!
    This would solve all his problems at one stroke, wouldn’t it?  Excitedly he ran out from his house in the middle of the night and perused his salvage yard with a flashlight.  He knew he had seen it somewhere and finally there it was caught in the beam of light, high up, up among the rats and spiders in the rafters - a single wonderful wing.  Surely this idea was dispatched down from heaven to meet halfway his question sent heavenward as he petitioned god for a way out of his dilemma. This was the divine way out of all difficulties.
    His first year of work on his roller skate board motor bike car, though in retrospect a bit of a failure, had given him supreme confidence in one thing above all, his innate ability to fit disparate parts of things that were never designed to go together, together, and fashion them into something which almost seemed like it should work even though it never quite would.  Unbowed, he remembered the confidence and forgot the failure, and became certain that his fine efforts could never prove to be for naught and must finally be realized in a roller skate board double motor bike automobile airplane.
    What a marvelous and beneficent thing is life.  To think that something he never would have dreamed of trying to construct at the outset, an airplane from scratch, was now exactly what seemed to be within his grasp by dint of accidental failure and incremental design.
    The whole next year he spent trying to make this dream a reality became a bit of blur in his mind as, like we said, his custom was never to take anything away from his previous efforts but only to continue to add to them like certain bureaucracies and tax codes and foreign wars of which we could speak.  So it was he became slowly entangled in all manner of complex asymmetrical mechanical and aerodynamical difficulties too fiendishly complicated to ever try to explain. 
   Finally he figured a way of attaching a couple of makeshift propellers to his old apparatus of bicycle pedals and hybrid auto engines and through another series of belts and gears managed to rotate them all together, even though they ran at alternating currents and at different and varying speeds.  He was way proud of the ingenuity he had displayed in rigging these things together.  
    To solve the problem of the tail of the craft he actually fashioned one from the fiberglass rudder of an old boat he found lodged among his refuse.  But even though he had used part of a boat in his construction, as he gazed on it as admiringly as a parent would a homely child, the only thing he thought his vast contraption wouldn’t be able to do was float like a boat.  Maybe by next year, he thought.  He reminded himself to keep his eye out for a few pontoons (he was sure he had some somewhere) just in case.
   As for his great wing, since he only had one, he tapered its one square end (originally meant to bolt to the body of a plane) to sort of resemble the properly engineered end and bolted the wing across the top of the whole roller skate board double bike car plane.  This he now considered a fuselage with wheels and a wing and two propellers, pedals, gearshifts, pulleys and belts galore, moving parts everywhere.  But through it all, on the handle bars by the hollowed out and padded half barrel that was his new cockpit, still the little red bell remained.   

   Meanwhile in the little community in which he lived curiosity had started to spread, interest to build and imaginations to flourish in regard this secret project.  After weeks and months people had begun to notice that this notoriously lazy and undisciplined man was going to his work shop, warehouse, junkpile, barn everyday as religiously as some might repair to church to repair their dealings with the Absolute.  Those who inadvertently wandered near enough his main barn could hear the activity, the rattle of metal on metal, the insistent hammering on parts that didn’t naturally fit together, the hum of the belt sander, the whirr of the power drill, the dull roar of a blowtorch and yes, even the occasional muffled swearword; all of which collectively signified the subtle but unmistakable sounds of industry emanating from inside a building where they had never been heard before. 
    This was a novelty designed to excite curiosity in the sleepy little town.  In mysterious concert with this unexpressed calling, one night several young adventurers, a few boys and girls, pushing and daring and double dog daring each other, whispering and giggling and just a little afraid, ventured close enough to sneak through a loose board in the barn door.  It was dark inside, they had a flashlight but, with the lack of preparation well befitting kids, it was dim, its batteries nearly dead.  Still what they saw or thought they saw shadowing against the light, was a great monstrosity of mechanical gear, gigantic or so it seemed to people that small, so disproportional to things they had seen before, that it seemed scary in the too narrow glow of the dim flashlight’s light.  They whispered among themselves and their friends next day about what they had seen and others picked up on the tenor of their descriptions and exaggerated them to epic possibilities and unimaginable heights.  
   Neighbors who knew the man actually asked him outright but, of course, he was a guarded man and gave dismissively enigmatic responses designed to hide as much as they revealed when he answered at all.  Naturally, when the description of what he was building with his tools sometimes changed by the hour or by the day this taciturnity was understandable. He often didn’t know he was building himself.  But this close mouthedness of his, taken as cunning rather than confusion, only increased expectation and fed speculation in the town.  Curiosity gathered and grew.  Wild speculations drawn from vague clues or inflated inferences dragged out of thin air began to grow rampantly as weeds in an untended garden.  All the while the hoe of truth which might have governed this speculation to order and tended these rumors to a halt was not forthcoming from the enterprising man.  This only further nurtured the weeds of speculation which finally grew to such an overgrown and jungly pitch that they overwhelmed reason and obscured reality from view.  
    But not for long.  Things were coming to a head.  In the workshop the project was reaching an end, not because of any actual conclusion or mental discipline on the part of the inventor to bring his efforts to any culmination but merely because, as with any large project, it had merely run its course, which is to say, out of space.  He had no more room indoors to keep adding onto his construction.  He had run into the age old problem on earth, limits of time and space and natural law and lifespan which truly govern life and sooner or later catch up to us all.  Put simply, things conclude, they cannot go on forever, for good or ill.  Due to the profound indifference of the universe to the plight of mankind, all things stop, ready or not.  In fact, the man had already so over built his roller skate board double motor bike single winged two engined aircraft that he had no door big enough to extricate the machine from its makeshift garage/barn/hanger.
    Soon as he set to work shoring up the roof of the barn so he could collapse one whole wall to wheel the overflowing eccentricity of his genius outside, word spread quickly among the people of the town that they would soon be able to get a gander at what he had been doing all this time.  A crowd gathered round for the expected unveiling.  Rumors were rife.  What would it be, the people asked?  The inventor still wouldn’t say, leaving it to the imagination of the gathering hoard.  But in reality, to his own jaundiced eye, it was only obvious.  Since he knew the history of each nut and every bolt, their meaning and purpose, he assumed any fool could tell at a glance exactly what they were seeing, since it was so self-evident to him.
    His confidence in their insight was to be sorely misplaced.  First once he had collapsed the barn wall, he required an entire team of mules to haul the thing out into the open space.  
    OOHs and Aaahs, were immediately replaced with huhs and what the..s… (?), from the gathered crowd. They were looking intently at it but no one had any idea what they were seeing.  Such a contraption has never been seen on the planet before, nor anything at all like it had ever been seen by any of them in all their collective days.  It was a wonder, an amazement to the eye.  A pure thrill such as confronts the world when it beholds something it has never anticipated and never imagined or ever seen accompanied the roll out of this phenomenal machine, sending a shudder out across the world and taking collective breath of the audience away.
    Since its creator had remained so terse and inexplicit no one had had any particular expectation as to what it was they were actually waiting to see.  Therefore it was an excitement to the imagination’s ability to dream.  When finally asked to explain the fantastic machine, and the startled and hurt inventor said in no terms which could be disputed that it was a flying machine, of course; those in the know about such things immediately knew it could not be. Those who wanted to believe in something new and unique in life suspended their beliefs and hoped it was. Doubters were confirmed in their suspicions and believers enforced in theirs as the crowd split into two camps almost immediately.  
    When he actually put the thing into gear and all the bells and whistles and belts and gears lumbered into marvelous motion the crowd was transfixed in awe.  Like an eternal motion machine with its thousands of moving parts it could only progress a few feet ahead at a time before panting to a rest. Then with a great effort and clatter and a great revving of its unmatched twin engines and its two propellers which turned at different speeds, with much extraneous racket, the energy would audibly build for a time and when put into gear again would lurch ahead a few feet more and then stop on its own, apparently to rest up for it next brief foray ahead. 
   Who had ever seen such a thing before, the people asked one another incredulously?  And as it rolled around the open field never gaining enough speed to do anything but to exercise its own elaborate, mysterious motion internally, to the exclusion any apparent purpose that anyone could see, the doubters were only confirmed in their doubts.  “This looks like more a carnival ride than a flying machine that could transcend gravity,” one person decided.  “If that thing flies, so will my herd of pigs,” another said, even more derisively.  Others, though decidedly in the minority and without a good explanation as to why, were just as convinced it must fly.
    “What kind of fool would it take to build something so extravagant if it wouldn’t work?” they reasoned aloud.  “The very fact of all this work justifies it. There must be a method to this madness, else if this doesn’t work why would anyone spend so much time and effort to build it?”  Other than to mumble something about the lunacy of the human being having no known bounds, the doubters had no good response to that.
    But it’s generally easier to be decisive and dogmatic when you’re wildly wrong because all countervailing evidence can be discounted and rationality dematerialized.  In this case, forceful behavior straight ahead always wins the day for in this day and age, in these passive times, whether wrong or right, people in these live and let live times always react to disasters too late rather than work to prevent them before they occur.
   Of course, the more intelligent in the crowd, those who had expertise and knowledge of the world, their feet firmly on the ground, their eyes sharp and wary, and who knew something of simple physics, natural law and basic engineering principles, dismissed the unflying machine pejoratively at first sight as an extravagant mess, mechanically unsound.  
   Whereas others, because our intrepid inventor was so otherworldly cocksure and invoked the deity, because he admitted of no doubt and was personally upright, because expectation had built up in their own hearts and because they hated for these other people, these realists, to be right because this meant they must be wrong; suspended logic into belief, transformed doubt into blind faith and believed even more fervently than before in the efficacy of this emerging catastrophe the more vehemently the more the others protested.
   Taken aback by his many doubters, for his part, the inventor merely serenely weighed in that, “…of course it will fly.  Just a little tinkering more, a little more propulsion to account for its weight and it will soon shoot for the stars.”  He only smiled at all the chatterers who couldn’t see his vision and let facts get in the way of their eyes.  He derided all those who could only see present things, barely past their own noses, while he, a visionary could see far, far away into distant pasts and futures.  He was so impressive when he explained these things, so calm and persuasive, that a certain kind of otherworldly cult began to build around him.  
    But then a curious thing happened to the man.  A transformation began.  As the crowd reacted to the invention the inventor began to react to the crowd.  He was a quiet man unused to seeing so many people in one place.   Subjected to growing hooting and hollering from the doubters old insecurities he thought he had long since put to rest began to rise again to the fore. Suddenly a man who had never cared a bit about politics and public approval was thinking of nothing else.  All his careless habits in private, his unregulated thoughts, which had no consequence there became magnified to dangerous and erratic emotions when exposed to the air of mass disapproval or acclaim.  He realized what he should have already known, that things kept private don’t matter but when brought public do.
   Now in the midst of all this clamor he found he liked being the center of attention more than he expected, so much that he began to behave defensively to earn the crowd’s approval.  He started to exaggerate, claiming things for his flying machine that he never would have dreamed claim before.  He threw caution to the wind.  He took slights personally and displayed an arrogant disregard for criticisms of his invention which previously he might have objectively and humbly been inclined to share.  After all, he had never said what he expected from his flying machine before so he literally had no position to protect.  Yet when the majority of the crowd argued and disapproved his sensitivity was aroused and he fought back.
    In this the inventor was neither appeased nor disabused.  He was mortified and chagrined that he was being thought a fool by so many people.  So he let himself be maneuvered into defense of a position he really had no reason to try to protect because it was a position he had never taken in the first place.  Inadvertently he became wedded to his own cause.  Before it had hardly even mattered to him, his work was a hobby, a lark.  Now he felt he couldn’t let down the people who believed in him.  He was hurt and angry and resolute.  He knew that if could only get his contraption off the ground then he would be deemed a success.  That would show those doubters whose opinion he cared so little for, once and for all.  With his supporters goading him on, he convinced himself that with just a little more elbow grease applied, another tweak or two, he could get his extraordinary machine to fly.  Just a bit more propulsion and lift was all it needed.  
    At last, he stood up defiantly upon the wing of his craft, his emotions high, his thoughts beguiled, and looked out proudly upon the arguing crowd.  He raised his arms and called them to order and swore in a loud voice that all could hear, that his machine would indeed tame gravity and touch the very clouds within two weeks time!
   Next day when the crowd had gone away he went to his scrap sheds and pulled out a secret weapon, boxes of unused weather balloons.  He affixed a half dozen each to front and back.  Taking no chances and pulling out all stops he unearthed a few metal canisters which he filled with gas.  He put one on each side which, when lit, he expected to create a “surge”.  Along with the balloons which would provide “lift” he had a new slogan to beguile the masses from the town.  He called his new method “surge” and “lift” and sent out word guaranteeing a launch date for the very next week.