Don't Play Sports & I Just Can't Make the Evolutionary Leap

Okay. Here is my advice for all the machismo people out there - don't play sports. Take up reading or playing music or drawing or gardening or investing. Yes - all the things that I (you think now) thought were too sissy when I was younger. Besides, girls dig all this stuff anyway. They could care less if you are a sweaty beast who can hit a little round thing or tackle another guy like you're tackling some animal to catch your supper. I have come to realize this doesn't impress them one bit. But it took my 41 years, a bad knee and 2 bad shoulders to realize it.

I just finished having an MRI on both my shoulders the other day. You know this really big machine that resembles a white coffin, invokes claustrophobia and tortures you with deafening noises you never heard before for 2 hours. So, now I'm doing a little rehab for some partial tears in my shoulderous musculous joint of the deltoidious facitous thing (I think that's what the Doc called it) to avoid surgery.

Then I ask him about my knee and he says, after looking at the x-ray, "Well, you're looking at total joint replacement in about 15 years. But don't worry, I predict that they will be able to grow back cartilage by that time due to stem cell research. So, stop running on the tread mill." I say, "Thanks Doc, I'll just have a bad knee and I'll get fat. That will help."

So, were all the macho years of baseball, soccer, football, lifting worth it? Since it hurts so much today, I think you know the answer.

Back to the MRI. First of all, I have no idea how the doctor knew what he was looking at as he was explaining it to me but there is a lot of stuff inside my body. I mean bones and muscles and tendons and ligaments and cartilage and fluid and organs and veins and blood and cells, etc. I always thought it was one piece of tape-like substance that held my arm to my shoulder. Wow. I was way off. It's complex.

This got me to thinking (imagine the little thinking bubble)...how in the world could all this happen in stages or by chance? It just doesn't add up to me. I mean, if I was somehow evolving and let's say I was just a body (not to mention all the organs that would have needed to evolve perfectly and necessarily for life to function) and was growing an arm but I was missing all the myriad of tendons and cartilage and ligaments and muscles, and veins and arteries, etc. how is that supposed to work? Let's say only a few things grew properly, I would have this floppy appendage growing from my body that was quite useless. How would I eat - you know, get food from anywhere to my mouth? I guess when I reproduced (this isn't so simple either) then the idea must be that the next generation realized that that last part didn't work out so it grew one with a few more tendons or muscles or whatever? Call me naive but it's really confusing to me. It would be a miracle that anything survived on this planet. Ever. How can a whole that is made up of so many millions or billions of parts become a whole if the parts weren't all there in the first place?

Sorry, I am just not smart enough to make the evolutionary leap. Oh yeah, forget about the sports thing - it hurts later in life and girls could really care less. In other words, you're not impressing anyone. Well, it's the truth.