It's strange to think of one's life as analogous to climbing a mountain. It's even stranger to discover, after years of striving to reach the summit, that it's the wrong mountain.

That is what happened to Dave.

Dave spent twenty years climbing the wrong mountain. And yet he had to consider it time well-spent. After all, no one could have told him he was relentlessly scaling the wrong pile of dirt (not that they didn't try). Dave had to find out for himself. Which is why, in the perverse way life happily screws with us, it turned out to be exactly the right mountain.

In order to see things clearly, to understand the actuality of his existence, Dave had to crawl up a treacherous incline that only led to happiness in his poorly-formed, childish dreams. There was never an alternative mountain for ol' Dave, because he was incapable of envisioning one.

So he climbed.

Until one day, he looked around and saw that he'd reached the top.

The pinnacle.

The apex.

The place where eagles crap.

And that's when he noticed the mountain he was always meant to climb far off in the distance. And he noticed something else… everyone climbing that mountain was truly happy.

So Dave did the only thing a sane man could do in his situation: he sent word to those people and told them they were on the wrong mountain.