Giving Voice

I have a special memory of being told creation stories. I remember only a few details of the creation stories themselves. I can try to reconstruct it. What struck me in the telling wasn't so much the actual stories but the way Lani and Lono took turns at telling them.

I think Lono started it by telling the Christian story of genesis. Lani countered by saying that other people had a different idea of what happened, and he told of how all there is sprang out of the primordial god Kanaloa.

Rather than argue which of the two of those ideas was right, Lono said there were still others who had a different idea. He told another story from the tradition, how the sky god Lani and the earth goddess Papa made love and Papa gave birth to the other gods and eventually Kane, who made people from rocks.

Rather than argue which of those three ideas was right, Lani said that there was another view, that was like that, but said that Kane made people out of clay.

Lono said that there was widespread agreement that men were made from clay, which was why the red clay was sacred, as well as the color red, but actually there was another view, that it wasn't men who were made from the clay, it was the taro plant, and men later descended from the tarot plant over many generations.

Pretty soon the words, "but other people say" had me in stitches every time I heard it.

I understood the joke. Anyone who says they know how the world began is wrong. Nobody was there to see it. But that doesn't prevent us from talking about it. The real creation is the recreation that happens every time you tell it a new way.

Whenever I hear Creationists and Evolutionists debating I remember that conversation, and laugh all over again.

YOU don't eat right.

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. -- wes]

I finally have the osteoarthritis I've long expected. This is mildly annoying. But it's not a total disaster thanks to glucosamine.

This brings to mind one of my pet theories. I have a theory that you don't eat right. Actually the theory is none of us do, but I like to say YOU don't eat right, because I want to maintain my creds as a certified public annoyance.

The theory goes like this. Humans evolved over millions of years to eat what they could back before the last Ice Age forced them to invent throwing big rocks in order to eat the giant hairy elephants, because everything else went south.

So what were apes with barely any hair, dull teeth, no claws, and flimsy sticks able to catch? Well for one thing they had prehistoric broccoli. Prehistoric broccoli tasted worse than now and it was tougher. There was no broccoli "head," it was all stem. So your Mama chewed it all day before giving you any to eat. This is when the expression, "no dessert until you eat your broccoli" really meant something.

In those times "dessert," of course, meant protein. As rice and beans had not been invented yet, and as cows, pigs, etc. were too big, fast, pointy or bitey to catch, protein generally meant eat your bugs and grubs. Even lame humans can catch bugs and grubs. Bugs and grubs are a great source of protein.

And here's the beauty of it, and why I'm bringing it up now. Bugs and grubs are also a fantastic natural source of glucosamine. So the theory goes, we are all coming down with arthritis in our not so old age because we aren't eating what we evolved over millions of years to eat. Instead of eating our glucosamine laden bugs and grubs we're eating cows.

And we aren't even eating the parts of the cows that might help. We are having butchers cut the cartilage off our cows so that chemists can process it and resell it to us as chondroitin and mix it at high cost into our glucosamine pills.

Excuse me. YOU are having the butchers do that. I just eat at McDonald's. Do they even have butchers anymore?