Allow me to introduce you to Reuven Shriki, a character from another era. An era that felt completely wild at the time, but, looking back, was almost boring. Today, when every little anecdote I write about a neighbor I ran into at the grocery store weighs half a ton on the page, I can’t help missing those carefree days of yore, when even apricots didn’t have pits.

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Meet Reuven Shriki. A fantastic guy. The man with the plan. Someone who had the guts to live the dreams most of us don’t even dare to dream. Shriki’s rolling in money, but that’s not the point. He also has a girlfriend, a French model, who posed in the nude for the world’s best slick magazine—if you didn’t jerk off to it, that was just because you couldn’t get your hands on it—but that’s not what makes him the man either. What’s special about Shriki is that, unlike others who made it big, he’s no smarter than you, no better looking, no better connected or shrewder, he isn’t even luckier than you. Shriki is exactly—I mean exactly—like me and you, in every way. And that’s what makes you so jealous—how did someone like us get so far? And anyone who tries to say it was the timing or the odds is full of crap. Shriki’s secret is much simpler: he made it because he took his ordinariness as far as it could go. Instead of denying it or trying to hide it, Shriki said to himself, This is who I am, and that’s all there is to it. He didn’t try to make himself more or less than he was, he just flowed with it, naturel. He invented ordinary things, and I stress, ordinary. Not brilliant, ordinary, and that’s exactly what humanity needs. Brilliant inventions might be good for brilliant people, but how many brilliant people are there in the world? Ordinary inventions, on the other hand, are good for everyone.

One day, Shriki was sitting in his living room eating olives filled with pimentos. He didn’t find the filled olives very fulfilling. He liked the olives themselves much more than the pimento filling, but, on the other hand, he preferred the pimento to the original hard, bitter pit. And that’s how it came to him—the first in a series of ideas that would change his life and ours—olive-filled olives, what could be simpler? An olive without a pit, filled with another olive. It took the idea a little while to catch on, but when it did, it refused to let go, like a pit bull clamping its jaws on its victim’s ankle. And right after the olive-filled olives came avocado-filled avocados, and finally, the sweet crowning glory, apricot-filled apricots. In less than six years, the word “pit” lost one of its meanings. And Shriki, of course, became a millionaire. After he cleaned up in the food business, Shriki moved on to real estate, and with no special vision there either. He just made sure to buy where it was expensive, and guess what, within a year or two, it got even more expensive. That’s how Shriki’s assets grew and in time, he found himself investing in almost everything, except tech, a field that put him off for reasons so primal he couldn’t even express them in words.

As it does with every ordinary person, money changed Shriki. He got more cheeky, more cheery, more beefy, more touchy-feely, in short, more everything. People didn’t adore him, but they didn’t abhor him either, which is nothing to sneeze at. Once, during a TV interview that got a little bit too personal, the interviewer asked Shriki whether he thought a lot of people aspired to be like him. “They don’t have to aspire,” Shriki said, smiling, half at the interviewer, half to himself. “They already are like me.” And the studio filled with the sound of wild applause booming from the special electronic device the show’s producers had purchased especially for up-front answers just like that one.

Imagine Shriki sitting in an armchair on the deck of his private pool, trailing a piece of pita through a plate of hummus, drinking a glass of freshly squeezed fruit juice, as his curvy girlfriend sunbathes naked on an air mattress. And now try to imagine yourselves in his place, sipping the freshly squeezed juice, tossing some sweet nothing to the naked French girl. A snap, right? And now try to imagine Shriki in your place, exactly where you are, reading this story, thinking about you there in his mansion, imagining himself sitting beside the pool in your place, and zap! Here you are again reading a story, and he’s back there. Ordinary as hell, or as his French girlfriend likes to say, trés naturel, eating another olive and not even spitting out the pit, because there is none.

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"Shriki" translated by Sondra Silverston, from THE NIMROD FLIPOUT by Etgar Keret, Copyright © 1992, 1994 by Etgar Keret. English translation copyright © by Etgar Keret. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.Intro translated by Jessica Cohen