Presented here are two tales I wrote in response to a 12-page letter I had received in the mail from my taxi-driver friend, Doug, back in Toronto.It really has nothing to do with Japan - just that they were written there. I think the stories (short, too) are highly amusing, and I hope you don't mind me sharing it with you here today. Both stories were written by Andrew Joseph (me) back on May 27, 1991. To see what else happened that day, you can read my blog entry HERE.
Meanwhile, enjoy the stories.
AND - here's that second story I wrote back to Doug.
Hope you enjoyed the stories folks. In some sort of weird way, I like to think the origin of life in our planet did start the way I suggest in the first story... and it's also the way our planet will end in the second story - not with a bang, but a whimpering spelling mistake.
Somewhere looking up words in a dictionary,
Andrew Joseph
PS: Did you notice that 'god' was only a 4-bit computer... but that even in 1991 I had used the term 'google'. You know the number 'google is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes, right? It is.
Meanwhile, enjoy the stories.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
by andrew joseph
Have you ever visited the stars? Have you ever truly been out there on the perimeter where brave men fear to tread? Gods, but I envy you. I suppose I've been there, too, but not in this form. Nor the one before it. I feel like I was one of the original sentinels of the spaceways. An easy rider on the cosmic wave. Y'see...I know things. I know how it all began.
A long time ago when the world was young, Earth was visited by 'aliens'. They wereobviously more intelligent than the creatures that inhabited the sphere, forthey were like Gods to them. Let us make man in our own image. So they took themonkeys and did genetic alterations to them to side-step several time-consumingeons.That the monkeys would eventually grow to be like the visitors without their aid is not likely... for they were happy in their ignorance of higher evolutionary animals. Still, the visitors gave the simians a kick to allow for faster evolutionary growth. Missing link?Ha! There is no missing link - save perhaps for the alien physicians.
So, how did life evolve on Earth? Well, I'm told that the ancients of those visitors came to this orb when it was but a watery bauble. Landing their spaceship to make repairs after it was struck from a chunk of the almost-planet between Mars and Jupiter (the so-called asteroid belt), some of the astronauts decided to lookaround. The air was breathable for them - much heavier in ozone content thanwhen it was the most plentiful element in what constituted our atmosphere. Thefirst breathe they expelled after removing their helmets was the beginning oflife. As humans would eventually have, these visitors had plant cells inside oftheir bodies. Flora and other bacteria would grow.
But what of the carbon units?
Well, kilometres from their ship, a scout party had a corlan break (lunch). After eating, Nature called and they had to take a dump. Themess that would eventually evolve from their lunch would become animal life forming: mollusks, fish reptiles, amphibians and finally mammals who would growto be monkeys who would later be genetically altered to skip a form toeventually become Australopithecine (I couldn't spell it to save theuniverse... ah, but that's another story.) and eventually the Neanderthals andthe Cro-magnons.
These two sapient-like individuals would shape our destiny. There must have been twoexperiments! The Neanderthals lost. Thanks perhaps to a lightning storm settingfire to a teak tree in a neighbourhood the Cro-magnons happened to control thatweek. The rest was history, as the strong rule by fire... much like today,where he who possesses fire from Prometheus' Pit by splitting an atom (worldsscream asunder) often controls our destiny. I am the god of hell-fire.
And that was the origin of Man.
We are an endangered feces.
AND - here's that second story I wrote back to Doug.
ANOTHER STORY
by andrew joseph
Once upon an eon, I was a dog-face in an intergalactic exploration unit. Our mission was to try and convert as many of the indigenous lifeforms we found to our way of thinking or to show them the error of their ways by sending them on their way to meet our creator.
You can imagine my surprise when I died a few years later and found out that our creator was not the being we thought, but rather a strange metallic square with the ubiquitous (I can't remember the meaning, but I was told it was the word to use) name of Eyebem-Rom-Forebit. One of the lesser pixels who had arrived scant google-eons prior to my demise told me the 'entity' was rumoured to have comefrom the future. "The future what?" I asked, but to no avail. He knew not the answer. Nor did any of the transmogrified specks of silicon.
Deciding to make it my new after-life's goal to find out, I simply asked the entity. It said (or thought or wrote) I had to best him at a game first.
"What type of game?" I asked.
"A spelling bee," it answered.
God has a sense of humour.
To find out where the entity was from, I was told I had to beat THE god in a contest. If I lost, I would be responsible for the extermination of my universe. God was into some really wicked stakes.That's what you get when you dare to challenge a deity, I suppose. It would notbe that difficult as all the words would be from my planet.
The Creator graciously allowed me to go first. My first word tohim was to spell nothing. After a billion years, IT finally deduced itwasn't a trick question and spelt the word correctly. My chore was to spell"Australopithecine".
"What's that?"
"It's an evolutionary by-product of your planet."
"Oh? So why haven't I heard of it?"
"Because it hasn't come into being yet, and it won't be known as that for five million years after."
Well, I had to admit it had me there. I was impaled on a future word. I had lost. The worst part is that the word is non-existent on what was once my own planet. But since GOD knows we accidently started life on a shit-hole called Earthduring an exploration mission (God considered Earth a summer home), theUniverse is dead.
It's not my fault really - chili con carne just upsets my stomach.
Hope you enjoyed the stories folks. In some sort of weird way, I like to think the origin of life in our planet did start the way I suggest in the first story... and it's also the way our planet will end in the second story - not with a bang, but a whimpering spelling mistake.
Somewhere looking up words in a dictionary,
Andrew Joseph
PS: Did you notice that 'god' was only a 4-bit computer... but that even in 1991 I had used the term 'google'. You know the number 'google is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes, right? It is.
