W. BRUCE CAMERON - Tom the Caveman

My neighbor Tom is going on the “caveman diet,” which he believes will improve his athletic performance if he ever does anything athletic.

“See, we’re surrounded by all these chemicals and processed foods,” Tom told me, so excited he momentarily stopped coating his hotdog with aerosol cheese. “But on the caveman diet, you go back to eating the way we did when there were dinosaurs roaming the land.”

“I think if we had been around when dinosaurs roamed the land, they would be eating us,” I responded.

“So, like, meat — cavemen ate meat,” he told me, gesturing with his hotdog. “Now, though, we eat all this other stuff, like sugar-coated cereal, it’s bad for kids.”

“I get it,” I nodded. “You’re doing this for the sake of Pebbles and Bam-Bam.”

“Want me to squirt some cheese on your dog?” Tom asked politely.

“Well Tom, about that — do we have any evidence that cavemen actually sprayed cheese on their hotdogs?”

Tom frowned. “Well, we know that when Man first invented fire, the wild cows would be drawn to the flames to keep warm, and that’s when we started milking them for cheese.”

“I think there’s probably some truth in what you’re saying,” I acknowledged. “Just not very much.”

“The can is just a delivery system,” Tom reasoned. “There’s not much difference between spraying it from a can or directly out of the cow.”

“At least you’ve mastered thinking like a caveman.”

“Thanks!”

Tom and I each opened a beer, deciding that cavemen must have had beer, for heaven’s sake. “What else would they drink during baseball games?” I asked.

“Any beer bottles would have broken down by now, leaving no trace,” Tom asserted. “They were probably made of clay, with labels just painted on, somehow.”

“What does your wife think of this?” I asked Tom.

“She says I had a head start on being a caveman because I already smell like one,” Tom replied.

Talking about his wife reminded Tom that she had made apple pie and there were two pieces left. “Apples, you know they had apples, it says in the Bible that it was practically the first thing cavemen ate,” Tom told me.

“Lot of sugar in pie, though,” I responded dubiously. “Maybe you shouldn’t have any, and I should eat both pieces.”

“Sugar!” Tom snorted. “Come on, you don’t think that cavemen living in Hawaii didn’t eat sugar cane, grind it up for their coffee and put it in pineapple-upside-down cake? It’s the fake stuff, like what’s in diet soda, you have to avoid.”

“No diet soda,” I repeated.

“Right. Just the real stuff.”

“So what other foods do you need to avoid?” I asked.

“Rice,” he said promptly. “Pasta.”

“You don’t like rice or pasta.”

“Right, it’s like my body instinctively knew what was best for it. Want another hotdog?”

“Well, I don’t understand, if you were a caveman in China, you wouldn’t eat rice?”

“There weren’t any cavemen in China,” Tom said scornfully. “The whole country was walled off.”

“OK, well, what about Italy? You don’t think they had cave spaghetti in Italy?”

I had him there. He pondered this while putting some ice cream and caramel syrup on our pie. “I guess I don’t know that much about Italian cavemen. I’m mostly an expert on the ones from around here.”

The game we were watching ended, precipitating a crisis when Tom couldn’t find the remote so we could channel surf for something to watch. “Tom,” I chided, “the TV remote is like your spear. No caveman would ever lose his spear. How are you going to protect your cows from dinosaurs?”

“I could stand at the TV and change the channels manually,” he replied helpfully.

“Like a caveman would ever do that,” I responded.

Eventually he called his wife and asked her where she lost the remote. She suggested he check in the couch cushions where it was last time, and that’s where we found it.

“Good thing your cave wife had her cell phone with her,” I told Tom.

We sat in front of the TV like two cavemen huddled around a fire.

Waiting for the cows to come home.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com.

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