Читать книгу The Men Commandments - Christian O’Connell - Страница 22

If we’re going to do this thing properly we should take our starting point as the moment we crawled out of the sea. This one’s a no-brainer. We all know men hate the sea. Sure, we’ll swim in it, we’ll hang around on the beach and look at it, but live in it? No way.

You’ve only got to look at any man on holiday whining about all the dried saltwater on his back and the fact that his soggy shorts are making his arse itchy to realise, men + sea isn’t going to be a long-term deal. Our genitals don’t like it either. Shrinkage happens, as Jerry Seinfeld told us.

So at some point around 315 million years ago we decided we’d had enough. That and one of us spotted a prehistoric babe in swimwear and someone selling cheap counterfeit watches and to the beach it was, baby!

For the next 314 million years or so we ambled about on the earth splitting into hundreds and thousands of species. This makes sense. Men aren’t the best at staying together; we like to drift off as something catches our eye. You often see women frantically looking for their boyfriends and husbands in shopping centres only to find them safe and well staring at the widescreen TVs or fondling gadgets. I’m always losing my wife at the supermarket. Maybe they need a desk for Lost Men to go to.

This is a store announcement. Has anyone lost the following men: Steve, Bob and Gary? If these men are yours please come and collect them from the Lost Man Desk…

Without wishing to sound dismissive of this period, not much really happened. What man couldn’t enjoy wasting 314 million years doing fuck all? Man heaven.

Obviously I’m not counting the dinosaurs – they were very exciting – but this book isn’t called The Dinosaur Commandments (that’s the next one). In fact, the most exciting thing that happened to mankind during this long era was that around 100 million years ago, we reached a crossroads in our evolution.