Ode to My Big Toe
August 23, 2008 3 Comments
I don’t think my big toe gets enough credit. It’s big, it’s bulbous, and it’s a toe. That’s pretty good as far as I am concerned.
Unlike my other toes, my big toe saved my life once. I was walking down my street on a hot summer day back in ‘79 — this was three years before the big heat wave here in Texas, but it was still pretty hot — and I had caught the attention of a bengal tiger that lived in a rundown house at the corner. I think the bengal tiger came from a pretty low class family because that house always stank of stale beer and old farts. Plus, I don’t think it was really a bengal tiger. But saying bengal tiger makes the story sound better.
So there I was looking for all intents and purposes like lunch. At least as far as bengal tigers are concerned. I knew I had to do something quick, and I knew how afraid bengal tigers were of pelicans. Well, not really, but for the purpose of this story we are going to pretend that bengal tigers are afraid of pelicans. The only problem was that I hadn’t seen a pelican on Heath street in Rockwall in a good three weeks.
I’m sure you know where I am going with this. There wasn’t much else that I could do. Everyone knows that dolphins can put on a pretty fair imitation of a pelican. Now, I didn’t have a proper rod and reel, but I did have my big toe which could be used as pretty good dolphin bait — at least it could after I covered it with some red nail polish. I went ahead and painted on some golden stars too simply because I like looking my best.
Now, the problem with catching dolphins in Texas is that there isn’t much ocean front property, so you’ll usually see them camping out in trees. Being a kid I was a pretty fair tree climber, but I didn’t have enough time to put on my tree climbing gear so I got out my trusty power chain saw and just started ripping through tree trunks all the while waving my big toe around to attract a dolphin. (Luckily, my left big toe is detachable. I’m not sure its re-attachable — I haven’t been able to get it put back on yet — but detaching it is a pretty simple matter when you are holding a chain saw.)
So, just about the time I was going to give up looking for a dolphin, I discovered I had just cut down a tree filled with elves. Now, as you can probably guess, these elves had dedicated their lives to cooking up tasty treats for us humans to eat. These particular elves specialized in brownies. “Magic brownies” they called them. And they were. I ate a couple and found myself more hungry after eating them than before I’d stuffed the first down my throat, but I was giggling too hard to actually ask for another one.
It was at this time that I first had the idea for Rock Band. I thought, hey, playing music would be really cool if you didn’t have to learn how to play music and instead of buying expensive instruments we could buy plastic ones.
Unfortunately, when making my notes, I accidentally substituted a C in for the R which led to a completely different invention. But that’s a story for another day.
So, there I was sitting around a campfire with a bunch of elves eating some tainted brownies with a bengal tiger staring at me from across the street when I get the sudden urge to play some baseball.
Now, not too many people realize just how good a bengal tiger is at playing baseball. After he ate the third elf, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to strike him out. So I threw him a meat pitch right down the middle. That seemed to do the trick. The bengal tiger gave me a really big belch — the kind that blows your hair back and makes you look like you went to a real fancy hollywood spa to get yourself styled — and lumbered back to his home at the end of the street.
And that’s when I realized that I should probably carry a few elves with me at all times just in case of bengal tiger attack. Unfortunately, I’ve found that they do little good against dinosaurs. But I guess you can’t have your elves and eat them too.
