Larry wandered into the forest, collecting birch branches. Didn't emerge until dawn.
The day had gone smoothly. Collected a thousand branches. It was quite possibly his most successful day in all the years that he had been in the routine.
It was a happy life, collecting birch branches. Larry would have been perfectly content to continue it, but today something changed.
Drawn by the spectacle of a skyscraping tower of partially rotten sticks that Larry had built up in his backyard, a tourist emerged and posed to Larry a question: "What are you doing?"
To the simple-minded city-folk, it was just a simple question. But to Larry, it was a serious conundrum, one that opened new doors of philosophical thought.
"What am I doing?" Larry repeated in shock, as if he didn't understand.
Slowly, the question sunk in to the crevices of his brain. "What... am I doing?" he asked himself.
It suddenly became clear to Larry that he needed some purpose, some goal, some meaning to life.
He disappeared for several weeks, thinking on the problem at hand.
Wandering through the forest, he came to a lone birch tree, and gazing up at it's peeling bark and dying leaves, there arose within him a sort of hatred. He hated the tree, hated it with every fiber of his being. He hated the gnarled grain. He hated the ugly, ugly bark and the dull triangular leaves. He hated the tree, hated it with such passion that his malevolent gaze would have been enough to set it ablaze if only his rapidly buzzing bug-eyes had focused on any single point.
He hated the tree.
And so he climbed it, stripping it of every branch on the way up. And when he reached the top, and gazed below, he saw the product of his anger, a smooth, round tree with no branches protruding save the single one that he was holding onto at the top of the tree; the single, thin branch that was already beginning to snap. Larry's hatred of the tree intensified as he realized that the tree had supplied him with no way down except the painful route of gravity, and it was in that moment of blind rage that the answer had revealed itself to him. He knew what he was doing. He understood his purpose. He had a plan.
"Tomorrow," he boldly exclaimed, "I'm going to march into this forest once again, and strip every birch tree I can find of it's branches! That'll show them!"
And with that, Larry became a man with purpose.
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