Recently I won a staring competition with a deer, which got me thinking about how much free time I have. It also got me thinking about the point, in general, of animals. Thinking about animals made me hungry.
My brain would have none of this thinking business and like that bitch at the party who won't dance with you because it's that time of the month (for the third weekend running), my brain took its periodic time-out. Then, miraculously, or because I was still fully alive, it came back on. It then, flickered off and on a few more times - as many times, curiously enough, as it takes for you to figure out that this paragraph has made absolutely no contribution to the story, and that I have wasted roughly a minute of your time, time that could have been spent feeding hungry mouths in Africa. Time that you will probably have spent finding just the right scent of virtual perfume you'd gift a smelly friend on the Facebook, having a small chuckle after, and updating your status message so everyone from the kid who bullied you in preschool to the "friend" you made on that long bus ride home, knows that about 12 hours ago, for about 3 seconds, you chuckled. This is probably as good a time as any to just skip over to the next para, because (...drum roll...) my brain turned back on.
Truth be told, my issue with uncooked animals began roughly an hour before I even met Bambi. To test my hypothesis, I had asked a fresher at college to come up with 10 reasons why a beer is better than an animal. He showed up later that night with 5 reasons you might expect to find on the tight-fitting tee shirt of a 30-something, Dorito-loving comic book collector, who'd rather spend sleepless nights in front of a SETI screensaver hoping for signs of life from outer space, than hope to get a life for himself, but not in the brain of a fully formed adult human. As is the usual practice in dealing with unfathomable stupidity in the overly sensitive wake of 9/11, I gave him a cookie, a colouring assignment and send him on his way.
That night, I decided to pose the same question to a deer. Unsurprisingly, I got no intelligible response. But to my utter dismay, I soon discovered that deer cannot colour either. I could think of little else to do with the deer. So we stared awkwardly at each other. After all of 20 minutes, it got bored, and left to chew some cud.
Forgive this digression, but some readers wrote in requesting that the second paragraph be incorporated into the story, so that they can stop having recurrent nightmares about starving children in Africa. Yeah, double word play...big whoop. After much thought, I decided on this most plausible turn of events.
All that thinking about animals and flickering of brain let to a mild epiphany, and it wasn't long before God Himself showed up, wearing nothing but a perfectly placid smile, which could make even the most obdurate infant release a gurgling, dribbling, carefree giggle, make incoherent conversation with complete strangers who will make it a point to embarrass him well into adulthood about it, and wet himself senseless thereafter, and a backpack with 20 beers, which usually has the same effect on me.
We discussed at length His criticism of the rampant spread of capitalization in the name of the Lord. He also assured me that where the Pope does his business is his business, although twice last week he was spotted taking "long walks" in the woods. We washed the beers down with 2 glasses of homemade wine, which I quite regret now. God, or G, as he insisted I call Him, then sat down cross-legged, placed his palms on his knees, closed his eyes, and told me to brace myself for what I was about to hear. A minute into his discourse on the true purpose of my existence on earth, however, I excused myself as I needed to pee.
Furious, He began to mumble about how he should have taken the sixth and seventh days off and had a full weekend to visit in-laws and do some gardening. Depending on whether you follow Christianity or psy-trance, production of either humans or hashish will have suffered. I couldn't be bothered either way; I just needed to pee.
At His wit's end, He hurriedly scribbled this into the sand below me - "We - B - Lo ~ G" hoping I would take a hint, and a leak, at that. Instead, I walked 500m back to my hostel toilet. As I took this whiz, I thought about why God came and how little he spoke of animals. I thought about the fresher, his colouring assignment, and whether he had managed to keep his smudges within the lines. I even thought about introducing another para like the second one, right here...just to throw readers off. But I didn't. I knew what I had to do, as if God Himself had said it to me. I had to start a blog.
PS: No animals were harmed during the making of this blog entry. But, the next entry, which actually broaches the pointlessness of animals, does involve harm to random animals, including but not restricted to, one headbutt, one dogpile, and general swearing.
