Blast From the Past: Second-milennium music star Billy Ray Cyrus stops to pick up a "deposit" from his erstwhile keeper, Big Bear.
Someday, far into the future — if we make it that far, despite the existence of guys like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Will Ferrell — people will look at photos and video from our generation and presume the following:
That 20th/21st Century Americans worship women with large, pointy, nippleless breasts and no genitalia. Historians often assign “maternity worship” qualities to past civilizations, based on finding dolls with large bellies. But who’s to say they weren’t making fun of fat people — just as they should have been (and as we rightly do)? In the future, an archaeologist finding Barbies and Kens and G.I.s Joe will think we were a strange, strange people… and will labor to find an explanation as to how these mutilated people continued to exist.
That homosexuality peaked in popularity in the 2010s, thanks to the hard work of the executives at HGTV. Aside from the “gay-only” cable networks — and, really, does anyone actually get these channels? — no one has labored harder for the mainstreaming of same-sex relations than the fine folks at HGTV. Despite being less than 13 percent (and that’s a liberal estimate) of the population, gay couples seem to find themselves in at least half of the episodes of “House Hunters,” “Rate My Space,” “Color Splash” and “Flip That House”. I know this because my wife loves these shows. Not because she’s gay, but because her husband just isn’t that smart, and it’s the only way she’ll ever know what a Renovated Ruin with Olive Grove in the Hills of Italy looks like. (For whatever reason, we’ve noticed that no mattress or detergent or cereal commercials feature same-sex couples, even on HGTV. When two men — who love each other very much, by the way — make it into an erectile dysfunction ad, then the gay community will know that it has arrived.)
That dogs ruled the Western Hemisphere. These are things I have witnessed, with my own two eyes: An elderly woman, who can barely walk, pushing her chihuahua around in a stroller. (Or maybe it was a walker, and maybe she was blind… anyway.) A cemetery filed with headstones memorializing creatures with names like Spud and Spot and Ticklypoo. A grown man, putting on a plastic glove and picking up his pet labrador’s shit, then depositing said shit into a ZipLoc bag, for what future purpose I have no idea.
We have lost our minds.
What else could our postcessors possibly think? Myself, having never touched the fecal matter of anything that didn’t start out as a sperm inside my own grand loins, I can only begin to imagine the level of laughter that will be had when our memories, etched in Kodak film and USB hard drives, are seen by The People of the Future. “Look at these animals!” they’ll intone, and Future NPR will do all manner of stories about how The People of the Future evolved from a much lowlier version of human, one that was lower in brainpower (or willpower?) than even a mangy animal! These people held onto a rope, which was attached to the Superior Mammal’s neck, and this Superior Mammal then walked Lowly Subhuman around for exercise. Of course, if Superior Mammal needed a drink or a whiz or whatever else… well, Lowly Subhuman wasn’t that dumb… it was allowed to “help!” What fun!
And, every once in a while, the occasionally generous Superior Mammal would run over to the fridge, clasp the handle in its well-kept teeth, open the door and get a cold beer for its sad subhuman counterpart… “Stupid Pet Tricks” indeed.
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R. Justin Shepherd is a recovering journalist, aspiring screenwriter and owner/operator/aficionado of Spencer's Coffeehouse in Bowling Green, Ky. He also keeps a microblog of sightings, linkings and brief thinkings at in3rds.tumblr.com.
Nothing can break down plastic. The sun and water just break it up into little bits. So imagine a shipment of Barbies lost at sea, getting buried by sediment, and fossilizing. Not only will future archaeologists be baffled by our weird shit, but a bazillion years hence Barbies and shopping bags will be the only things left of civilization. I, for one, am beaming with pride.
These “superior mammals” have even become film superstars that will surely influence academia! What sorts of conclusions will be drawn from future human beings who are writing dissertations titled “Beethoven’s 4th: An Anachronistic Interpretation of Judge Reinhold”?