Tuesday, October 03, 2006

I Wonder As I Wander

Many times in our lives, often multiple times per day, huge life questions get hurled at us and we often find it easier to just brush them aside. I personally find it far more productive to do so, because if I stop and think about them, I find it difficult to concentrate on anything else. For example, "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" It is far simpler to just rattle off the tongue twister than to put thought into it, but it seems to me that if we never stop to consider the question, we will never find the answer. This particular question gives birth to a whole litter of other questions on closer acquaintance. What exactly is a woodchuck? I, for one, immediately think of that delicious brand of hard apple cider, but it must have gotten its name from somewhere. I have never been one to sit in the dark, and have always demanded answers. Why should this be so different? Why should I follow everyone else's example and let this deep and complex question slip by to allow for the pursuit of the mundane?

Do you know what a woodchuck is? It's a GROUND HOG! Possibly one of the least interesting animals in the world that has garnered fame from ruining peoples back yards and keeping our roads populated with road kill!

That was unfair of me. I've actually always liked ground hogs and spent one summer trying to convince my uncle there were more humane ways of getting rid of them than sitting on the porch with a rifle. Granted, those were mutant ground hogs, the size of beagles and completely undeterred by any threat of human interaction, but still! A rifle? Plus, They have, on occasion, provided endless entertainment, scurrying away from my curious pets and siblings and the like. It's funny, sometimes, how easy it is to lump my pets and siblings into one group... Anyway, it's not that I have something against ground hogs, or woodchucks for that matter. The question would probably not have persisted through the decades had it been "How much wood could a ground hog chuck if a ground hog could chuck wood?" It loses something for me. Also, I am not sure that I would trust a woodchuck's forecast come February 2, but I blindly follow whatever a ground hog will tell me, be it 6 weeks 'til Spring or 6 more weeks of Winter. Also, I wonder if sales would be as good for the previously mentioned manufacturer of draft cider were the brand name "Ground Hog Cider." I got a mental image of a pig being ground up and bottled as a liquid... eeeewwww!

If I were The Pink Shoe, I would probably take this opportunity to do "facts about ground hogs/woodchucks," but she would do it so much better. I'll stick to what I do, not that I'm sure what that is, but I'm pretty sure it's not doing "facts about."

Given the fact that neither woodchucks nor ground hogs chuck wood anyway, it is probably in all ways fatuous to even pursue the question. And yet here I am and here you are. And we will both spend more time than is healthy trying to figure it out.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ahh. But if you can't be fatuous on thine own blog, where else can one be fatuous. I did know a woodchuck is a groundhog because I used to live on Woodchuck Lane. By the way, those cute little big as beagle groundhogs can eat heapum, lotsem corn! We had to pick em off on our farm or there would have been no sweet corn left for us.

jo! said...

mmmmmm.... sweet corn! Perhaps the woodgroundchuckhogs and I have more in common than i thought!