Bizarrness flows at 3a.m. I don’t care if it’s bad, I had fun writing it. Words flowed.
I hadn’t chewed my nails in years. Ten, to be exact which was the same length of time I’d been away from Bridgeville. It’ s funny, you know, how easily ten years of growth and maturity can be derailed by perfectly simple words like “hometown” and “family”.
Bridgeville is one of those little towns you either love or hate. If you’re looking for “community” (obituaries on the newspaper’s front page) and “tradition” (your grandpa got by without indoor plumbing, so you can, too), and star athletes holding multiple records in multiple sports (which include the full array of back-seat gymnastics), then Bridgeville is for you. If you yearn for “independence” (a career outside the family business) and “anonymity” (a private sex life), and you sense there is more to life than racking up points on the sports field or in the back seat, then you bide your time til you can get your ass out of town.
The thing about Bridgeville, and small towns in general, is that the population is a bizarre cross of mule and elephant, which God saw fit to stuff into human form.
Seriously. God was probably sitting around Heaven one day, swizziling fermented Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil juice, and watching to see if anything good was happening on Earth, but it’s the same thing, day in and day out, and He’s a little bored. The angels are glorified yes-men, so they probably egged him on. Who knows, maybe the angels were bored, too.
So God is stting there, buzzed and bored, and since cards are illegal in heaven, or maybe just unknown, someone brings Him some clay. He fumbles around a bit, pinching here, twisting there, rolling it all up and starting over again, getting a feel for the clay. But he’s just not feeling the clay today. He’s maybe a little too buzzed to be getting much of a result from raw material. Anyway, He casts the clay aside, and nothing much is happening on Earth, and He shakes His head sadly. “You know what’s wrong down there?”
The angels look at each other. “How could anything possibly be wrong down there. You put in six whole days on this project alone; it’s paradise, you do good work.”
God gets a little irritated with the yes-men, they’re so busy saying yes they’ve missed an important point. He drinks a little more fermented Good-and-Evil juice, and calms down a bit, and then he announces, “Boys, that’s the problem. It’s paradise down there. It’s perfection. It’s boring. Where’s the drama, the action, the entertainment? All these animals, they eat, they sleep. You can only watch so many nature documentaries, you know? And these humans? They’re perfection, too. I poured my heart and soul into them. They’ve got no drive, no minds of their own. Boring.”
The angels sort of shuffle their feet, and maybe there’s a few nervously twitching wings. But one is braver then the rest, and says, “Well, that can be fixed, can’t it?”
God smiles. The angels shiver.
He says, “Boys, bring me my working models. We’re gonna do us a little transplantation.” (The G&E is really hitting Him now.) “Experiment, liven things up a bit.” And by the time the models are all gathered, the angels have gotten into the G&E, too, because hauling all those models around is thirsty work. And all of Heaven is roaring drunk.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if we paired a shark and an emu?”
“No, no, a rabbit and a horsefly!”
“Ooh, look at this! This elephant!”
God picks up the elephant, admiring his handiwork, and nods. The angels are further encouraged. They toss out other possibilities: a flamingo, a koala, a dormouse. The fermented Good-and-Evil juice is passed around some more. Somebody finally shouts “Look at this mule! Stubborn and thick-headed. Pair that with a long memory, and look out!”
God says, “That’s the ticket, that’s entertainment. Let’s put those two together, and see what we get.” But the elephant is really big, and the mule is really stubborn, and Heaven can’t fit them together. So God pauses to refresh his G&E, and think a bit, and out of the corner of his eye, He catches a flash of movement. It’s the humans, and He chortles with glee.
The humans get invited up to the Heavens and plyed with fermented Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil juice, and it’s heady stuff, you know, they can’t handle much of that, plus, they’re in the presence of God, and they’re nervous, so they sip pretty readily to take the edge off, and hey presto, the humans wake up feeling a bit strange. The man is reeling around, feeling a bit heavy headed, and he comments on the woman’s shadow, which seems a trifle larger than it used to be, and the woman is in tears, he thinks she’s fat, she’s humiliated, she’ll never forget the horrible, traumatic moment, not for the rest of her life. The man thinks that’s ridiculous, there’s nothing traumatic about being fat, and would she stop crying, all that noise is hurting his head, and soon they’re arguing. But some of that fermented Knowledge of Good and Evil is still in their systems; they’re mad at each other, but mad looks really, really good, doesn’t it? Really … attractive.
And nine months later, voila, you have a new breed of human with varying degrees of a long memory and hard, stubborn heads. Clashes are unavoidable, now, and the noice reaches all the way up to the heavens.
God is holding His head, which is already aching, and wishing he could think of a proper curse. Instead He forbits fermented Knowledge-of-Good-&-Evil juice in the Heavens, and tries to forbid Knowledge-of-Good-&-Evil completely down below. The angels have to go along with His edict, but the cat’s out of the bag with the humans, so to speak; the humans have gotten a taste for “Knowledge” (which is really just another word for gossip), “Knowledge” is much easier to accumulate in small groups, so an affinity for small towns is born. And the world will never be perfect or boring again.
It’s just a personal theory, of course. But it explains the population of small towns like Bridgeville.
