Dumber than a Plank

Stop imitating me, you idiots.

So apparently people have been idiots since the 4^th/5^th century although I am pretty sure this isn’t big news to any of you. As long as there has been human-kind, there has been stupidity. (With reason comes the inherent opportunity to be unreasonable.) But in the late 300’s-early 400’s, this crazy Christian dude, Saint Simeon Stylite (who began physically abusing himself at age 13 in the name of the Lord), sought some serious spiritual solitude by sitting in prayer for 37 years…wait for it…on top of a pillar. (Some accounts say 39 years, but whatev. It was a long fucking time.) Simeon, who was really trying to get away from the crowds of pilgrims who came to him for divine guidance, ironically made himself available to the throngs and preached sermons to his visitors. His favorite topic: the evils of profanity. Dude would’ve hated my ass.

Eventually, St. Simeon’s feat evolved into the even-stupider-than-praying-on-a-pillar-until-death-from-a-thigh-ulcer pole sitting craze of the 1920’s and ‘30’s. The longest anyone lasted on a flagpole was 51 days, until this Polish guy in 2002 who stayed on a pole for 196 days. But he took a short break every two hours. That should NOT count. And besides, how do we know he wasn’t on a Pole for 196 days? I mean, hell, it could’ve just been his wife.

But. Leave it to the Aussies to bastardize and criminalize the whole craze. Pole sitting has turned into a little something called “planking,” AKA lying face down on a chosen surface and imitating a plank. Some professional Aussie rugby player named Wolfman planked during a televised game, and a new fad was born. Now people, and by people I mean blisteringly intoxicated shits-for-brains, have planked on race car tires, lots of way-high-up balconies and building ledges, train tracks, and all sorts of super-duper-dangerous venues on which to lie rigidly in place. Last week, I saw news reports that a couple of people have died while planking because they fell off the narrow planes on which they were lying, and, no, I do not mean airplanes although I’m sure someone will think to plank on one of those any second now.

Listen, I know oodles of people who do a damn good impression of wood, and even they aren’t obtuse enough to prostrate themselves on some precarious perch where one little shift of a nut may cause their blood and guts to be forever separated from their scattered body parts. I know that as long as there are extreme sports, insanely dense morons, and Miller High Life, there will always be poor, grieving widows, stuffed into brown pleather recliners hawking their gratuitous grief on respectaBULL news shows as their diaper-clad minions spill in and out of the screen doors to the double-wides. But shouldn’t…wait. Wait. Survival of the fittest.
Rethinking.

Nevermind. Plank on, idiots. Plank on.