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| Nature - it couldn't give a shit! |
The dog's awake. I can tell it's awake because it's trying to scratch its way out the front door, its dirty, little, black claws scouring muddy tracks into every surface. You would have to wonder if it evolved that sound. Claws that produce the perfect combination of crow squawk, baby wail and enemy at the gates to ensure that you will never fall back asleep. Claws honed over thousands of years of natural selection to crystallise into a massive pain in the hole. It's little wonder you hear stories of people pulling the fucker's nails out. I don't think I'd stop there though, I'd chop the legs off - just have a load of slug-dogs rolling around the place. Proper sausage dogs, none of your half-measures here. I'd better let her out. Five in the morning! What kind of an animal gets up at five in the morning? And there she goes now, off out into the dewy grass and the cobwebs. She's probably off to eat a shite. I guess it would be too much to expect that nature might have evolved on a curve better suited to my own convenience or even just for the convenience of civilised society in general. That would be better. There'd be no cats for starters - none. There'd be the sausage dogs, lolling around on the floor with no legs and chewing on old shoes and bits of toys. They'd still be working dogs though. Like, say you lived near a river, you could have four of them and tie one to each corner of a pallet or the top of an old picnic table or something and then you'd have a raft. You could ferry people over and back and the dogs would love it because they'd be getting a wash and a swim. They'd never be able to get up the stairs and hassle you in the bedroom though - it'd be great.
People could evolve to be more convenient too. Like take this gay marriage thing for example. If we could just have millennia of human evolution coalesce into a singularity of convenience none of this would be going on either. First up, there would be no genders or sexuality. It's not like we'd even look the way we do now. We'd just be these large, soft, silvery coloured balls. Nourishment would be taken from the air by osmosis and the overall population would be kept stable by the fact that each ball could only produce a single offspring, with the parent ball dying and providing nourishment to the other balls as soon as the birthing was complete. There'd be no need for family or community or the arts or conversations about the whites and the blacks and them from over there. No heteros, no homos, no in-betweenies because when the world is just a big ball covered in smaller balls all knocking together and saying nothing it doesn't matter what your name is and where you come from. Well, that's what you'd hope for at least. No doubt a fly would get into the ointment somewhere. Still, at least it would be a good place to start from - a bunch of squishy balls rolling around the fields.
Ah, that'll be the dog scratching to come in again. Here she is, always laughing. I wonder will she be as happy when she's a barrel on one corner of my raft. Half five now and the sun's already up. I can see a couple of bullocks out there in the field trying to ride each other. Not ones to let having their balls crushed in a vice put them off a bit of the oul sex. Take that intelligent design!
