hump daze

(originally posted 9/17/2014)

Before you start reading this, it is important that you understand that I know nothing about the evolution of horses or camels. I mean I literally know zilch about which came first or if they are even part of the same family. In my head, I imagine one of those charts that looks like a giant tree and the horse and camel come together at some point in the distant past, albeit they have flippers or fins or whatnot. The point being, I can’t have you getting halfway through and realizing I am completely ignorant of the subject matter and then getting all pissed off as if this was some nature documentary.

It’s a stupid story.

And it’s about to get a whole lot stupider.

You see, there was a time when the first camel came into contact with a horse. And perched on top of that horse was a human, digging his heels into the side of the unfortunate beast and making it carry him to and fro.

The camel took one look at that and said to itself, “fuck that noise.” Soon, word was passed around in the camel community and almost overnight, they were busy evolving humps to dissuade humans from trying to ride them. You had the one-hump crowd and the two-hump crowd, and apparently there was an even a three-hump crowd (the tri-hards) that didn’t catch on and was soon extinct, but both were soon disappointed as it became clear that humans didn’t care if they had humps or not and were soon dragging them into the same sorry shenanigans as the aforementioned horse. Apparently humans will ride anything they can get a saddle on. Camels could have evolved big pointy spikes like a stegosaurus and they’d still have humans lining up to get behind the reins.

So in the end, it’s like those signs you see near airports… the ones that read “Caution Low Flying Aircraft.” What exactly will being cautious do? What would being cautious entail anyway? How are you supposed to be cautious about low flying aircraft? If an airplane is coming in low, it’s either going to hit you or not hit you and there’s fuck all you can do it about it. No one has ever been hit by a landing plane because they weren’t being cautious.

“How exactly are camels and airport signage similar?” you might be asking yourself.

Do I have to do all the heavy lifting?

Even the question seems to indicate that you believe that the airport signage was just a clumsy and/or random segue because the camel observation had run out of steam after only three hundred words… a hundred and twenty of which were explaining that the other one hundred and eighty were complete bullshit.

How dare you?!

A clumsy segue would be noting that at a man’s hundredth birthday party, there is some irony in the fact that at the end of the day, he will remember the balloons and brightly-colored paper about as well as he remembered the delivery room he was born in one hundred years prior.

Now that is random.

You can look all you like, but there is no way that you are going to be able to come up with a connection between that and the evolution of a camel’s hump(s). Of course if I know you, which I don’t, you’re going to try anyway, so go ahead and get it out of your system.

I’ll wait.

See?

But when I wrote the part about the airport signage, there really was a correlation between the two ideas but you are simply too lazy to get your imagination in gear and figure it out. And if you think for a minute I’m going to explain it to you now after all the attitude you’ve been giving me, you’ve got another thing coming. Honestly, if you keep this up you’re going to have a hard time finding anyone to write stories for you.

At the end of the day, however you slice it, a camel is just a horse with humps.