Mulephant Brew

(I don't care if it's bad, I'm excited that the words flowed. The muse is back, baby!)

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 sords like "hometown" and "family" -

don't get me wrong. I loved my family during those ten years. I probably loved them more than I had while living at home. It was so much easier from a distance-

The compulsion to chew my right index nail was growing stronger, and the lead weight in my stomach was growing heavier, the closer I came to Bridgeville.

Bridgeville is one of those little towns you either love or hate. If you love community (read:gossip) and generations-old tradition (read:stodginess), and star athletes holding multiple records in multiple sports (which include the full array of back-seat athletics), then Bridgeville is for you. If you yearn for independence (read: a career outside the family business) and anonymity (read: 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 populatio is a bizarre mix of mule and elephant, somehow stuffed into human form.

Seriously. God was probably sitting around Heaven one day, getting a little drunk on 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 are bored, too.

So God is stting there, buzzed and bored, and since cards are illegal in heaven, or maybe just unknown, someone brings God 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 two humans catch His eye, and He shakes His head sadly. "You know what's wrong down there?"

The angels look at each other. "No Sir, how could anything 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. Too good. Boring."

The angels 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. He says, "Boys, bring me my working models. We're gonna do us a little transplantation. (The G&E is really hitting Him now.) 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! A memory as long as it's trunk, never forgets."

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. Thinks he has a natural born sense of direction, and refuses to accept direction. Just keeps going on his own trail."

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 they don't fit together well. 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, 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 soon they're arging. 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 G&E in the Heavens, and tries to forbid G&E 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 of 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.