Not Quite Right

Hotbed of the Ho-Hum

James Watt, after watching an iron kettle boil over, was sufficiently inspired to invent the steam engine. Imagine what could be invented after witnessing an obese epileptic eat tacos. The creation could, quite possibly, bring about the end of life as we know it.

Well, enough about that... I'm going to run with another recurring thought (fantasy?) that seems to pop up at obscure times. Yesterday, while directing my rider mower over the expanse of wasteland I laughingly refer to as 'my yard', I kept thinking
about how awesome it would be to wake up from a coma and have the first words out of your mouth be delivered in a language you didn’t know before you lapsed!

Can you imagine? Aunt Shirley goes around the bend five years ago and she's pretty close to the point where you start to plant flowers in her navel, when suddenly the lights come back on and she sits bolt upright and begins to greet you in Arabic or some other gibberish that nobody can interpret? How long do you think it would take the hospital to find an interpreter who could speak the Papua New Guinean Kewa dialect? Meanwhile, Aunt Shirley is trying to shove a bone through her nose and build a fire next to her respirator.

Do you suppose that all people in vegetative states are really getting intense Berlitz courses in the language of their choice and won’t be released back into the world until they’ve passed their final exams? That might explain why some folks never get back, they just can’t seem to memorize the proper verb declensions and formal/informal derivatives necessary to graduate.

And who is teaching these courses? Are there teams of metaphysical language teachers flitting around in our cranial midsts, merely waiting to seize the opportunity? Some celestial linguist gets the call: Mrs. Herbstreit, go to Randolph County, Missouri, you have a new pupil... one Mr. Bubba Church who wants to learn Middle English. Then, she creeps up behind me when I'm not paying attention, smacks me on the head, puts my lights out and school starts. Meanwhile, I get a four or five-year vacation at the Moberly Institute for the Simple, matriculating patiently while my skill levels hopefully soar to C- levels before graduation.

Just think, if I could master Middle English, my dream of becoming a thane would finally come true. I’d love to think that I could graduate somewhere before assuming room temperature, it might erase the horrors of high school.