Inherit the Wedgie

I really have to start carrying my digital camera around with me.  At all times.

I saw this guy in the post office today who had tucked his shirt into his underwear.  Now, we all learn as children that you should never, ever tuck your shirt into your underwear because it causes your underwear to ride up above the waistband of your pants.  We become aware of this when, usually during recess in grade school, someone comes up behind us, takes a handful of underwear, and yanks it up over our heads.  It's called a wedgie, it hurts like hell, and, according to some research I did tonight, it's been around for some time.

Wedgies date back as far as the Egyptians, I found, as is evident in cave paintings and hieroglyphics. Word has it, Michelangelo gave Pope Paul III a wedgie, and Henry gave one to Richard III during the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Upon the arrest of Alvin Karpis in 1936, J. Edgar Hoover hiked Karpis's boxers up to the nape of his neck.  Baseball greats Ty Cobb and Pete Rose were also notorious for relocating teammates' underpants a few feet north.  So we see what a rich tapestry of pain and humiliation wedgies have had throughout history.

Back to the post office: this guy's underwear was already halfway up his back.  I stood behind him for about two minutes before my hand began to shake.  I almost had to leave the line.  The impulse to give him a power-wedgie was nearly irresistible, and I think the only thing that stopped me was the realization that Charles Darwin was horribly wrong about this so-called "theory of evolution". 

According to Darwin's theory, someone like this guy should never have survived this long. Here he was, in his forties, his underwear just begging to be wedgied into next week. And a wedgie is something not soon forgotten, so I am to assume that this guy made it through childhood without ever knowing the searing pain of having his underwear suddenly jerked to his shoulder blades. If Darwin's "natural selection" was true, then the chances of this guy never getting an ass-full of elastic would have to be astronomical.

Speaking of high odds, however, you may think that I should concede a point for Darwin here. After all, the chances of anyone who walks around showing off a yard of underwear ever getting a date are about nil. Therefore, you might say, they will probably never reproduce, which means that the amount of wedgie-prone children will dwindle, and finally, hopefully, disappear. 

Wrong, due to the advent of artificial insemination. Undie Man here could walk right into a sperm bank, step right out of those huge, white briefs, and make a donation that the bank would file under Princeton Graduate or Pulitzer Prize Winner. Bingo. The shirt-tucked-into-underwear gene is passed on.

But that's neither here nor there, because I spotted a wedding band on this guy's hand.

Darwin.  Schmuck.

In fact, I began to doubt just about everything Darwin came up with as I stood there in the post office.  Evolution?  What a joke.  Darwin said that mankind evolved from "lower" forms of life, such as apes. We know this is not true for two reasons. 

First of all, we're still apes.  I know this because, now in my late twenties, I am still growing hair, most recently in such places as my left shoulder and on my ears. On my EARS for God's sake. By age fifty I'll be nothing but hair.

The other reason we know that this evolution thing is just silly is that it doesn't make any sense. If we evolved from apes, then we used to be apes, right? And we all know that apes are incredibly strong, agile, potentially ferocious things. What the hell reason is there to evolve? And how did we survive if we did? 

Evolving into humans meant giving up important means of defense and survival, such as amazing strength, layers of muscle, thick hair (well, some of it anyway), those huge fangs, and the ability to throw our own feces without becoming incredibly nauseous. And we abandoned all that?  What sort of defense did that leave us against the rest of nature? How could we have survived?

There is one theory I can think of: man's natural defense of looking absolutely ridiculous when naked. I figure if a lion or alligator lunged out of the bushes, the sight of a naked man would give it pause in the manner of uncontrollable spasms of laughter. I have experienced this firsthand, though not from, ahem, alligators. At any rate, this one defense mechanism would not allow man to survive for long, and therefore, falls short of a complete theory. 

It is still, however, a sore point with me.