November 2, 1995
Dear Everyone:
Lord, but I do hate
being human sometimes. This
is one of those times. My
back is killing me. Some
people have bad hair days.
Some have bad back days.
It went out last
Saturday. Notice I didn’t
say, “I put my back out last Saturday.”
I neither claim nor accept responsibility.
My back has a mind of its own.
Every once in a while, it will say to itself, “Gee, I haven’t
been out in quite awhile (she never takes me anywhere).
I believe I’ll go out right now.”
And SPROING!!! That’s
it. This thing’s been giving
me problems since the day the warranty expired.
And it’s all because
of being human. Skeleton and
muscles doing a job they were never meant to do, i.e., standing up
“straight”. Thanks to some
little pre-hominid on an island, somewhere around where
Ethiopia is today,
who looked across the shallow
Miocene sea at
another island and said to herself, “I’ll bet if I get up on my hind
legs and keep my nose above water, I can wade over to that island and
see if there’s any food there.”
And doing so, and finding more food, thought, “If I stay on my
hind legs, wading back, I can carry some of this food in my fore-paws to
feed my babies.”
Thus ensuring that
the daring little gene survived into the next generation and setting us
all on the long, evolutionary road to opposing thumbs and bipedal
backaches. Thanks a lot,
Eve.
The
Aquatic
Theory of Human Evolution is not all that far-fetched.
Clearly other mammals went into the water and stayed there,
dolphins, porpoises, whales.
While others spent some evolutionary time in the sea, like pre-humans
and pre-elephants, then moved back onto dry land.
There’s a lot of evidence that elephants were once aquatic.
But instead of becoming bipedal, they developed one heck of a
natural snorkel.
Another important
fact: In aquatic mammals,
the female reproductive organs tend to rotate towards the front.
This is clearly evident in humans, dolphins, porpoises and
whales. But in the case of
the elephant, it rotated back again after the elephant abandoned its
water environment. In fact,
the birth canal of your average elephant makes a complete 180º turn,
which probably accounts for why elephants stay pregnant for well over a
year.
Of course, if you
don’t believe in evolution, you can always take the Creationist view
that God created everything exactly the way it is now.
But, if God created man (and woman) in His own image, does that
mean that God has a bad back, too?
Either way, I
believe in my next life, I’d like to come back as a daffodil.
No back to have problems with.
Work for one or two weeks out of the year and sleep the rest of
the time. Sounds good to me.
In other news...
“Jeannie” has been
rearranging furniture at her place, part of a campaign to try and teach
the cats to come in through the bedroom window at night
without landing on “Jeannie’s” head.
(I’m sure that helping her move that huge armoire had nothing to
do with my back going out on its own.)
In order to move things like dressers, she had to empty them
first.
And that’s how she
found the six-foot inflatable iguana that had disappeared so many years
ago. (You might wonder how
anyone could actually lose a six-foot iguana, but my advice is, don’t.)
It being Halloween, she decided to inflate the iguana as a
decoration. Having finally
succeeded in blowing all six feet of it up, she set it on the coffee
table. Whereupon both cats
came to see what was going on.
While Monroe sniffed
delicately at the big, ugly, green thing, the white cat took a more
forward approach. Out came
the claws. Down went the
iguana. Then Monroe added
insult to injury by throwing up on it.
A word to the wise,
laughing hysterically at “Jeannie’s” cats can make your back hurt.
Love, as always,
Pete
PS.
Ashland
Update. I got the order for
the tickets out this week.
July 31st through August 4th.
Mark your calendars.
Everyone except Mom owes me $150.00.
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