Brain-dead immobility is the hot new leisure activity
SCIENTISTS CLAIM THAT humans are evolving into immobile blobs of pleasure-seeking fatty tissue. This is rubbish. We’ve been that for years.
I read about this on a recent afternoon which was so sleepy that the clouds themselves were napping, spread-eagled cozily on the green hills around our apartment block.
*
Indoors, I had been lying on the couch for so long that I was worried I may have actually become part of it. As a junior reporter, I covered a case in which a dead body had lain undiscovered so long that it merged with the sofa. The funeral people had to carry out and bury the entire Chesterfield three-seater. I'd often tried to image what the minister had said at the funeral. "Dearly beloved, we are here to remember this man and his sofa, inseparable in life, inseparable in death. He was a good man, and it was a good sofa." I tried moving my lower limbs and was pleased to see that I could, with some effort, separate them from the couch. Another ten minutes and I don’t know.
*
My reverie was interrupted by a voice so high-pitched that dogs for kilometers around started barking. "Daaa-aaad," it pleaded. The tone was the one struck by a small child about to ask for something for which the answer was always No. And I could guess what the question would be: "Can I watch TV?" Now I am NOT one of those monster parents who never let their kids watch television. On the contrary, I let them watch an entire half-hour show on several occasions, as recently as five years ago.
But I had just positioned my tongue on the roof of my mouth to say NO when my youngest child came out with unexpected request: "Will you help me make cookies to sell to people to get money for disabled children?"
"Nnnnnnn-yes," I said, dragging my weary bones into an upright position. (This is what comes of taking kids to religious services.)
*
Minutes later, we were in the kitchen making cookies. Now here's a mystery. Whenever a male parent and small child cook anything, we use every single container in the kitchen and STILL don't have enough. We have to empty flower pots and coin jars and use them too.
An hour later we had destroyed the kitchen but had produced a small basket of only-slightly-burned cookies. We set off to visit apartments in the neighbourhood.
At each door, I loitered in the background, and my child did the talking. "Would you like to buy cookies to raise money for disabled people?" she said, making her eyes so big that scientists would unanimously classify them as planets.
We could tell from the bluish glow within each home that our neighbours were spending their free time lounging on sofas staring comatose at their televisions. Pained looks suggested that extricating themselves had been difficult.
As we returned home with an empty basket and full purse, the infant prodigy asked whether we could do the same thing next weekend.
"Yes, but let's make something different next time," I said.
My plan is to create a solvent that separates couch potatoes from couches. One day there will be a huge demand for it. It won’t be long.
