Several
times a month it seems I start thinking about just how strange we
humans actually are from time to time. The incident that prompted
this latest mental minefield started in one of those super sized
hardware stores. I was in there the other day last week buying
something or another for my barbeque pit. Here I am happy as a pig
in you know what when this lady strolls up to me and asks if I
could help her find a fitting for some part of her grill. Well, we
stand there for several minutes looking for whatever it was she
needed and in the conversation we got to talking about the
weather. You know how strangers are, that’s where they always
start, with the weather. “Looks like rain, or sure been hot…or
in the winter…sure been cold.”
It’s always a fairly safe place to open up conversations between
people who have never seen each other before and probably won’t
ever see each other again. Anyway, I get to thinking about the
absurdity of using a grill to cook outside in the summertime. I
asked this lady…"Do you have a air-conditioned house?” She said
she did. Then I asked her…”Do you have a stove and cook top in
that air-conditioned house?” Again, she said she did. I told her
that I did as well. Then I told her that it seemed kind of foolish
for us to be in this big store shopping for parts for a piece of
cooking ware that required us to stand outside in the heat of
summer to cook. Knowing all the time we had a cool air-conditioned
house with a stove and a cook top inside where we could cook in
relative comfort as long as we wanted to do so.
In fact we are probably running the air-conditioning for an
entirely empty house while we are standing around in the blazing
sun watching sticks, wood and charcoal burn away just so we can
enjoy the pleasure of open range cooking. Tell me the truth; does
this make any sense at all? Are we nuts or what? I’ll bet you that
we could take a survey of the majority of the people living on
this planet who are living in perfectly awful conditions and they
would think we are crazy to cook outside. I mean I think there are
literally billions of people on this Earth who would think they
had died and gone to Heaven just to have a stove and a oven inside
of a house with a fan, much less air-conditioning.
Go to Outer Mongolia or the Sahara desert and try to explain the
pleasures of cooking outside in 100degree heat and see what they
say. I’d bet you they’d lock you up in a heartbeat as a complete
nut case. I mean think about this….do you suppose barbeque grills
and equipment are big sellers as leisure recreational items in
Baghdad or Cairo? I bet not. Then look at us, we go to the store
to actually buy things to burn up in the summer heat.
Some of our other habits and customs must seem extremely odd to
people from other countries. As another example. We plant grass in
our yards, then we fertilize and water it. Then we cut it down
every so many weeks. Why wouldn’t we just leave it natural to
begin with? We pay good money for water and chemicals just to mow
it off and start all over again. Is this sensible? We drink iced
tea with what? Sugar to make it sweet and lemon to make it tart
again. I bet we are the only county in the world that spends as
much as we do on garbage bags. Get several women together and at
some point in time, they will start discussions about the relative
thickness of this bag as compared to the thickness of that bag.
Men just want the bag to hold together long enough to get it to
the curb. From there on it becomes the problem of the garbage
collector. I’d be wiling to bet we spend more on things we either
burn up or throw away than the gross domestic product of some
counties in the world.
Take a step back and think about this. Are we crazy or is it just
me?
