Picture the following scenario. A stately aged hyena sits in his easy chair simultaneous watching two football games, a TV reality show about hyenas living in the wild who have become lumbar jacks and are racing a neighboring tribe to harvest an entire forest while driving 18 wheeler trucks across icy lakes. Outside on the deck he recently built little birdies feast on seed from his feeder. A 16 gauge shotgun is at his side to fend off any marauding crows which try to hog the feeder. He has told his wife the entire purpose of the deck and TV programs are for him to waiting patiently in his living room blind while attracting humming birds to his feeder so that he can observe their nest and advise her of the best spot for harvesting humming bird eggs to bake into a pie or cake for the church charity auction.
But then, his peaceful afternoon is disrupted by what sounds like a heard of deranged rhinos playing a discus toss with bowling balls and setting off noisy fire crackers while wearing football cleats which and track mud across a newly varnished floor. He reaches for his shotgun, reminding himself that there are reasons why some species eat their young. Refusing to admit that this eyesight is changing and also refusing to wear glasses, his attempt at focusing his sights on Junior are interrupted by the ringing of the phone.
The phone that rings is not just any phone. It is a “man phone”. Therefore the ring is not just any ring, but the bleeting sound made by an elk, only more funky and electronic. The grumpy elder hyena answers the man phone because his lovely wife is out gathering coveted resources from the weekend sale at the mall. Both he and Junior know that her eagle eye will immediately spot any new scratches in the newly varnished hardwood floor she made him put in as a prerequisite to inviting all of his buddies over to drink beer while allegedly building the deck.
On the other end of the phone is another grumpy elder patriarch hyena who asks “What the beep is going on over there?” in a raspy, disgruntled and angry voice. “I was in the middle of watching the army hyenas trump the flying squirrel squadron. The game was in double dog dare overtime, the deciding touchdown was being tossed and my reception went out because a bowling ball came hurling through my sliding patio door and took out the TV screen. It also knocked over my wife’s plant and she’s going to kill me when she gets back from the sale at Godzilla Villa.”
The elders agree it’s time to call an emergency meeting of the neighborhood daddy dog hyenas and come up with a plan. It’s time for junior to move out. They pack him into a space ship and send him sailing off to earth. Since then they have continued to monitor junior’s progress in his new environment through regular reports known as the Darwin Awards and You-tube videos.
Back on earth, junior evolved into modern day man. First came the need to grow opposable thumbs. This came about after a number of dog with a bone dilemmas. The first junior had a bone. Then he spotted another one. Junior wanted both bones but couldn’t get both bones in his mouth. He tried carrying one bone in his mouth while nosing the other bone along the ground back to his man cave.
The bone eventually became round from being flipped along the ground. This was useful but junior lost a lot of the bone that way. Ultimately paws became hands so Junior could scrape his knuckles along the ground and carry two bones at once, one in each hand. And so, teenage mutant space alien hyenas were the origin of today’s modern Cro-Magnon dudes.
And, back to the light bulb. Hyenas are pack animals. Therefore, it is only logical that modern day men are pack animals. Therefore it is virtually impossible to get a guy to change a light bulb (or to do anything else on the ‘honey do list’) without major complaining and without six or seven of his beer drinking buddies around for support.
Of course this support is not hold the ladder support. It’s conversational support. It’s guys coaching guys on the best light bulbs from the ideal real man’s hardware store along with stories about all the light bulbs ever changed since the dawn of man.
Of course, many of the stories involve harrowing near death feats. Men consider these events to be acts of bravery. When changing light bulbs, the stories involve flying sparks of electricity, exploding light bulbs that spray tiny shards of glass everywhere, precariously balanced tipping ladders stacked on uneven chairs with wobbly legs with an occasional slippery slope thrown in for dramatic effect.
The sad fact is that many of these stories, albeit possibly exaggerated, are based on true events. Today, we call the subjects of these true events the winners of the Annual Darwin Awards.
And so it goes. My husband changed a burned out florescent light bulb in our kitchen fixture today. This only involved standing in a chair, removing the cover plate while dumping remnants of dead bugs all over the kitchen counter and floor, and sparking the new bulb so it instantly burned out and tripped the circuit breaker. While he was up there, he discovered some sticky spots on the cover plate, most likely the result of our last exploding bottle of wine. This resulting in his taking the cover plate over to the sink while he held the sprayer nozzle very close to the cover plate and sprayed water at full blast over the cover plate. Gently wipe is, after all, a foreign concept and not one that can penetrate the concrete shell of the male brain.
But now I have a new dilemma. I have to decide which is worse – an electrical fire or telling my husband that something is jammed in the vacuum cleaner, causing the motor to emit the bad electrical burning smell that immediately precedes sparks flying. It might be better for my sanity just to go hunt humming bird eggs or troll the mall.
