Our Big Fat Brains

Today I helped some friends move a giant pile of firewood from one place to another, and in the process I became a little less alarmed about America becoming so fat and stupid.
I “work out” several times a week and I “work hard” at my job, but I don’t spend much time doing what used to be called “work” –  whacking dust out of a rug, digging ore out of the earth with a shovel, pushing a plow, or scrubbing laundry against a corrugated board, the sort of tasks we humans spent much of our time doing before machines started doing them for us. I use these machines but resent them at the same time. They declare our laziness. We are growing unfit for manipulating things, the very jobs our hands and muscles were designed to do. Can our brains be far behind?

Then today, six guys and I are confronted by a dump truck’s worth of wood. We had to get it down a narrow, poorly paved sideyard to a storage area maybe 150 feet away.

First we tried carrying it by hand, but that was depressingly slow and gave us splinters. Then we used this big bucket. I lugged it down the alley with a guy named Kishore over and over again. We sweated and our shoulders rounded against the weight. We all agreed that the job sucked.

So I put my mind to how to do it better, and so did the others. There wasn’t an announcement or plan. It’s just what we humans do. We don’t want to spend our time carrying wood and getting splinters, so we turn to our big brains because there’s got to be a better way, and it’s kind of fun, figuring it out.

We tried dragging logs on a piece of plastic (bad idea). Then we emptied out a few of the recycling and garbage containers which abound in San Francisco, the wheeled kind you leave out at the curb (so a machine can come by and pick them up) and put wood in there.

This was the most efficient solution. In other words, it moved the most wood in the shortest time with the least effort. You could say we were being lazy. But we were also being smart. It’s easy to forget, when contemplating the infinite and ever-evolving gadgetry of modern America, that serious creativity is involved in the creation of each one. So we may be fat, but at least we are still smart.

I, for one, intend to do the sweaty work of delivering this blog to you for the foreseeable future. Or at least until the Blog-o-Matic comes along, maybe five years from now.