Fasting For Dummies - 9/16/09

I am fasting today. No, it is not for Ramadan or any other religious purpose. Although by the end of the day I might understand strapping plastique to myself and finding an unpopulated area in to detonate. The military has trained me for such an event.

It is because tomorrow morning I am to be violated by a colonoscopy. You would not think a single day of fasting would be a crisis. but those of you who have seen me know that it takes a lot of fuel to keep this quivering mass moving forward.

Tonight is Wallyball at the Crabtree Gym. I want to go but I am afraid that if I keep passing out that sooner or later the opposing team might score. And I am guessing by the third or fourth such episode, someone will drag me from the court to eliminate someone spraining an ankle tripping over me. This would only happen after my daughter-in-law, Tia, used me as a springboard to get her 4’11” self closer to the net.

I have been fasting for a few hours now and am already starting to get light-headed. I have usually eaten a few rashers of bacon, a couple of eggs, some fried bread, and a quart of milk (skim for health) by now. Skooter is really pissed off as he normally sweats me for some bacon. He has repeatedly gone to the kitchen trying to figure out how to turn the range on.

I thought if I kept myself busy today, writing, I might actually survive. Watching television is absolutely verboten as my subconscious mind equates television to swinging on the refrigerator door during commercials (of which there are many). Skooter is also confused and angered by this as his treats are located en-route to a commercial break. So I might be uncharacteristically creative today, though by nightfall any accidental coherency in my writing will be gone. I will gradually become a monkey with a typewriter.

Most of us are probably familiar with the idea that if you have enough monkeys on enough typewriters for enough time, they will produce the entire collected works of Shakespeare. In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. One researcher, Mike Phillips, defended the expenditure as being cheaper than reality TV and still "very stimulating and fascinating viewing".

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it. The zoo's scientific officer remarked that the experiment had "little scientific value, except to show that the 'infinite monkey' theory is flawed". Phillips said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned "an awful lot" from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They're more complex than that. … They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there.

So stand by. Once I drink all of the Golytely, the monkeys will have nothing on me.