One Last Laugh

I’ve found a new way to amuse myself, which, after all, is what life is all about.

First, I picture some anthropologists about a thousand years from now discovering my crippled skeleton. That makes me chuckle. My skeleton will be a keeper for them because they’ll know right away it belonged to a cripple.  It bears the ravages of sitting on my ass all day. It’s twisted and bent. It’s contracted up fetal. The bones are soupy soft. Sitting takes a toll. If God intended for humans to sit on our asses all day, she would have made us all Congressmen. But my body either sits in a wheelchair (or on a crapper) or lies in bed. Every day I abuse my body by making it get out of bed.

Finding a skeleton like mine is the kind of thing that gives anthropologists a great big boner. They’ll construct a whole theory about who I was and what became of me. And they’ll present me and their theory at some hot shot anthropology conference.

And picturing that really cracks me up. Because I’m a cripple they’ll probably assume all kinds of things about me. They’ll conclude that I couldn’t keep up with my tribe and so I was abandoned. They’ll probably see evidence of the time I broke my femur. What will they surmise? Here’s what really happened: I was acting like a drunken smart ass. I was in college. We were drinking in our favorite dump bar. The bathroom was inaccessible so I pissed in the alley. I forgot to refasten my wheelchair seat belt. A friend gave me a ride back to my dorm in my cripple van. I kept making fun of her driving. She hit the brakes so she could pull over and tell me to get the hell out. I somersaulted out of my wheelchair and broke my femur.

What are the odds the anthropologist will get that one right? They’ll probably also assume that I once lived in public housing for cripples. That’s correct. But will they thus conclude that I hosted a wild pagan baby shower? A friend was pregnant. Her pagan friends wanted to have a coed baby shower in a location accessible for her crippled friends. So we used my apartment. It was a raucous night of unwrapping baby-themed gifts, drinking, dancing and smoking weed. I’m lucky we didn’t get raided. Hosting a wild pagan baby shower probably would be grounds for eviction from public housing. You can get kicked out of public housing for farting too loud.

I don’t think the anthropologist will deduce all that just from looking at my crippled bones either. So I really want to be a fly on the wall at that conference and watch them get my back story all wrong. It’ll be good for one last laugh.

Making that happen won’t be easy.  It will require having my head cut off and frozen. And then  my head will have to be thawed out and reanimated and smuggled into the hot shot anthropology conference by a future generation of sympathetic smart asses. And how will the anthropologists explain why their prize crippled skeleton has no skull? I can’t wait to hear what kind of crazy shit they concoct!

This is a long way to go for one last laugh. Pulling it off is a long shot. But it gives me something to look forward to.