Saturday 21 January 2012

Concise History of the World Chapter 1

The day the world was created was the start of things around these parts. You’d have liked to have been there and seen how irrationally your teachers would respond to the opportunity to visit in a time machine.
Take your English Teacher. The second she got there she’d have gone up in a puff of foul smelling smoke. Not that it would have been noticed. The whole place was smoking and odds are that the air wasn’t something you’d want to force into a spray can and sell as a room freshener.
Thermometers hadn’t been invented. Mercury hadn’t even been discovered; the element or the planet. Even so you can bet one couldn’t have kept up with the current weather back then. That thing with Mrs. Kelly was a pretty good indicator. The wind was at least a magnitude 88 hurricane, without the annoying rain. Humidity was a bit high too.
Everything we have in the world was there then, minus a few billion tons lugged in on visiting comets and meteors. Some of them might have actually been self-destructing garbage scows launched from planets with intelligent life that eschewed recycling. Most of this planet’s inventory was in a little different form than what you are used to. It was all just atoms and stuff still trying to find its way around the new campus. Some had formed friendships and become molecules of this or that right off of the bat.
As things became a little more orderly it still wasn’t anything your teachers, except maybe those who taught chemistry, could write much of a lesson plan about. Mr. Franklin would have been overwhelmed by the easy access to all of the elements and taken several days before he realized he didn’t have anything to make lab equipment with yet. At best, this was Merlin’s playground.
Old man Gibson’s geology tests would have been a lot easier if all of the ‘what kind of rock izzat?’ questions had the same answer; igneous. Metamorphic and sedimentary samples were a long way down the road, if there had been one of those. That was particularly true of the latter type. None of the liquids were oils either. The living things those were derived from weren’t even in stage one yet.
That brings us to Mrs. Hudson’s biology class. You could have slept through that and not missed a thing. There was no biology, though she probably could have taught a class on it and made as much sense as she does today.
One day though, a bolt of lighting slapped into a puddle of muddy water and the atoms there did something crazy, like they might have if they were on LSD. They clung to each other and became hundreds of single celled animals. After a while some of them became so bored that they started coming apart at the seams. They didn’t all die in the process and some formed two living cells in the process. Sex had been discovered. As we know it doesn’t always take two to enjoy that.
Where there is sex though, no matter how pleasant the current habits are, somebody is going to try something different. After a while some of the shy ones split but did in inside themselves, without forming two separate entities so nobody else would see them do it. That developed into a craze that produced creatures first with two, then three or four cells and eventually, monsters with hundreds of cells.
When that got boring, a few started experimenting. First it was a little spooning and petting, then they tried worse things. Before long they figured out how the two of them could get together and make a third creature without dying themselves. The stories their parents had told them weren’t true after all.
Hoping to avoid touchy questions that only your health teacher is supposed to know the answers to, let’s jump ahead and say the earth was now in the very early stages of being run over by life. Some of it was pretty complex and some of it was still boring. A lot of the more boring ones skipped going to drinking parties and went extinct.
Before long the first botany teacher was born. Her name was Eve and she was one of those, you know the type, who thought she knew more about fruit trees than God did. Take this thing called the tree of knowledge. She certainly did and she ate the fruit thereof.
Right after that she discovered the fig leaf. In the end she got herself and her boyfriend kicked out of the garden. Isn’t that the way it always works?
It sort of looks like some of you now have questions about this sex thing you want to work out so I’ll let you go find your health teachers or something and do that. This is a good place to end chapter 1.

2 comments:

  1. I come here hoping to learn about the history of the world and all you can talk about is sex? Good. Most excellent. Carry on.

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    Replies
    1. There are some obviosly narrow minded philosophers who believe the history of the world would be of no interest without sex having been invented. Granted, there are not many of them but as with most activist groups, they are loud and must be appeased.

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