The myth of the equestrian beggar

Those of you who are inclined to read my blog might have noticed that lately I’ve been having a bit of the writer’s block. It’s a curious ailment, this writer’s block—for one thing it seems to strike writers much more frequently than the general population, which is ironic in view of the fact that those are precisely the people who are most inconvenienced by it.

It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t writers just what it’s like. I suppose the best way to think of it is that it’s kind of like having constipation in your brain. You just keep on sitting there trying to get something out, and then your legs start getting numb, and after a while you get to worrying that maybe it’s not even writer’s block at all but something worse, something fatal and incurable. That maybe it’s a tumor of some sort that’s got everything blocked up, and now you’re never going to be able to live long enough to climb Mt. Everest. I don’t want to climb Mt. Everest, but I want to live long enough that I could if I changed my mind about it and decided I did want to after all. And then a little while after that, in case something else came up that I wanted to do, but hadn’t gotten around to.

The opposite of writer’s block is a condition called logorrhea (like brain diarrhea) which is where you spew out an excessive number of words. For some reason nobody thought to give writer’s block a nice name like that, as far as I know, so I’m going to make one up myself—dyslogia. This makes it much more obvious that it’s a real disease, which could even have marches and ribbons and stuff, and for which you could take prescription drugs.

Unless Tom Cruise found out about it, in which case he might jump up and down on your couch with his shoes on until you stopped. I read in the news today that Tom is dead set against people taking drugs for any kind of mental problem they might be having. He doesn’t take anything himself, it seems--it’s because he’s in the Church of Scientology and they don’t approve of that sort of thing.

Apparently Tom has been in the Church of Scientology a long time, and has worked his way up to being an OT-VII, or at least that’s what people say. It’s hard to know for sure, because it’s a secret what kind of OT you are. In fact, it seems that being an OT-VII is a lot like being a secret agent, so there’s no way to know for sure if somebody’s one unless Karl Rove tells Robert Novack and he writes it up. I hope Robert Novack doesn’t get the dyslogia or we never will find out.

It sounds like it’s pretty fun being an OT-VII, because you can control the universe with your mind, among other things, and get Katie Holmes for your girlfriend, and jump on people’s couches whenever you like, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Cause if they complain you can shoot death rays out of your eyes and vaporize them, and that’ll shut them up pretty fast, I’ll bet. Tom is so high up in that stuff that even Oprah can’t stop him from jumping on the couch, despite the fact that she controls a major portion of the universe with her own mind.

When he was a kid my friend Rob and his sister used to jump on the couch so much they ruined it. His Mom would try to get them to stop, but she never could, and one day she just gave up and stood there watching them and said, “Well, I guess I just can’t have anything nice.” Rob and I called that the “Prime Directive” and felt that it applied to our jobs, and to certain other aspects of our lives at the time. Then Rob went and got a bunch of nice things, but I have done my best to remain true to the Prime Directive.

I sort of wish now that I had just dumped that Prime Directive years ago and gotten some other kind of Directive that wasn’t quite so restrictive, or maybe joined up with the Church of Scientology, but you know what they say “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.”

Why do they say that? Wouldn’t it be much nicer if people would just state their point in plain and unambiguous language instead of feeling compelled to toss in one of these odd little sayings, which don’t usually have any real connection to the subject at hand. Because if no beggars or horses were involved in the initial discussion, I can’t see how it’s at all helpful to introduce them into it.

Frankly, I don’t think that whoever wrote this particular adage knew a whole helluva lot about beggars to start with. Probably not horses either, but beggars for sure. I’ve encountered a lot of beggars—they’re all over on Mill Ave.—and not one of them has ever asked me for a horse, just spare change. What would they do with a horse anyway, if they had one? Spare change is easy to store, but the same cannot be said for a horse. Some beggars have dogs or cats that they push around in shopping carts, but you’d be hard pressed to find a shopping cart big enough for a horse, and even if you could there’s probably some ordinance against it.

And if there’s not they’d make one fast enough, once the sidewalks started filling up with shopping cart horses and people couldn’t get by them to go into Starbucks. Soon all the politicians would be making hay of the situation, lamenting about how these unsightly horses are discouraging tourism and ruining the economy, and promising to be tougher on shopping cart horses than their opponent is, and saddling the poor beggars with all kinds of fines and unfunded mandates. Before long they’d be begging day and night just to pay the horse’s bills, and have no time to beg anything for themselves.

No, a horse would be the complete and utter ruin of a beggar. It’s absolutely the last thing they need.

Or want. Like I said, no beggar I’ve ever met expressed any desire for a horse. Most of the people I’ve known who ever showed much interest in horses were rich people, not beggars at all. So I believe it’s more likely that if wishes were horses, rich people would ride, and then when they got back home there would be beggars all over the place, cause they would have had sense enough to wish they were rich people, not for some stupid horse.

I think they’ve made the mistake here—and it’s a common one—of assuming some facts not in evidence. In fact, I’m not convinced they were even facts to start with. Not only do they seem to be making the unwarranted assumption that a beggar would wish for a horse, but also that the wishes beggars make always come true. Cause it doesn’t say “If wishes were horses AND wishes came true, then beggars would ride.” They just assume the horse wishes are going to come true. But I feel like if somebody’s a beggar it probably shows that they’re worse than average at getting their wishes to come true, cause I doubt that that many people would wish to be beggars.

Furthermore, it shouldn’t say they would ride, only that they could if they wanted to, because a lot of them might not choose to ride even if they had a horse. I know I’d think twice about it, and I’m not even a beggar. So it should really say “If wishes were horses, AND if wishes really came true, AND if a beggar made a wish, then that beggar would receive a horse and could ride the horse if he or she chose to, and were physically capable of doing so.”

Oh no, that wouldn’t work, because there’s another saying “Beggars can’t be choosers.” So I guess the beggars would have to ride on the horse whether they wanted to or not. It doesn’t seem right to me to force the beggars to ride around while everybody else can do as they please, and it might not even be legal. Somebody should challenge that saying in court, and clearly establish once and for all a beggar’s right to choose. The trouble is that it’s hard to find a lawyer who’ll work for spare change.

So I suppose that until they can get the law changed, the saying should read “If wishes were horses, AND if wishes really came true, AND if a beggar made a wish, then that beggar would receive a horse AND would have to ride the horse or be found in contempt of adage.”

Actually, if you examine it a little more closely, I guess it doesn’t really say that only the beggars would wish for horses, but that any wish that anybody made would result in a horse. It’s like sometimes when you send away for something, there’s fine print where they say that if they don’t have the thing you ordered, they’ll send you some other thing of equal or greater value. So you order one thing, and then you get something else that you didn’t want. It seems to me that it’s debatable if that thing is of equal or greater value--or of any value whatever, if you’ve got no use for it--but you can’t send it back because of the fine print. Well, I guess you could send it back if you wanted, but they won’t give your money back, so you’d wind up with nothing.

So no matter what you might have actually wished for, you’d get a horse instead--and good luck trying to send it back. What a mess that would be! I’m always wishing for stuff and I’d be in a world of trouble if every time I wished for a boat or something I got a damned horse instead. Make a wish, get a horse. Make a wish, get a horse. Hell, there’d be horses all over the place in no time. Not only could the beggars ride, but also anybody else who wanted to and who could manage to get up on a horse, which isn’t always that easy, because they’re pretty tall and not very cooperative. I guess most people would probably want to ride if they could, because with all those horses around it wouldn’t be very pleasant to walk anywhere. Still, while a strong case can be made that under these conditions many formerly non-equestrian segments of the population—including, though not limited to, beggars--might ride, it is not possible to state with absolute certainty that this would indeed occur.

Now that I think about it, they don’t even say that the wish is going to produce a horse, but that the actual wish itself would become a horse. But what’s a wish? It’s just a kind of thought, which is something inside your head. So if one of your thoughts suddenly turned into a horse, clearly what would happen is that your head would explode. It’d be a bloody mess, and you sure as hell wouldn’t be riding around on any horse after that.

Actually, they don’t even claim that the wishes are going to become horses, but that in this peculiar universe postulated by the adage, they are already horses and always have been, so maybe evolution has been able over the course of billions and billions of years to provide people with heads large enough to accommodate a horse or two. I wonder if that means that what used to be horses in the regular universe is now wishes, or if there just aren’t any wishes at all.

Or maybe there’s one entity now, which is both a wish and a horse simultaneously, like light is both a wave and a particle. The way it works with light is this: If you just go about your business and don’t pay any attention to light, then it’s a wave, but if you get to looking at it it’ll turn into a particle just to spite you. Then if you turn your back it goes back to being a wave, but if you try to whip around real fast and look at it it’s a particle again, no matter how quick you are. It’s kinda like if you were trying to watch something on TV, but every time you looked at the screen the picture just turned into a bunch of little dots. The thing about it is that the physicists have set up cameras and got some pictures of light being a wave, so I don’t know why it doesn’t just own up to it and quit being so pigheaded.

So in the weird universe there’d be this one thing, probably called a horsh, and every time a physicist looked at one it’d go from its wish nature to its horse nature. That’d be one wacky universe, wouldn’t it? I bet physicists wouldn’t be very popular in that universe, and people would avoid them like the plague. Actually, I don’t think they’re all that popular in this universe, even though they can only turn light back and forth, which doesn’t seem to cause much of a problem. People in this Horsh Universe though, they see a physicist coming, they’d run like hell. Cause if you weren’t really careful what you were thinking you might accidentally make a wish, and those physicists would explode your head with a horse just like that, before you had a chance to take it back.

Unless you had one of those supersized heads, then the horse could fit, but I bet it would still be pretty uncomfortable. And now it’d be really, really hard to keep from wishing that you didn’t have a horse in your head, which would give you another one, and pretty soon you’d have a whole herd of them in there and your head would explode anyway, cause there’s only so much that evolution can do. It would have been a complete waste of time for evolution to have bothered making those giant heads if they’re not going to work any better than that, and they don’t sound very attractive either, so my guess is that the Horsh people have regular sized heads just like ours.

Another one of those conditional sayings that’s kind of similar is the one about “If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their butts on lily pads.” That one’s just plain stupid, it’s even worse than the horse one. They make it sound like those lily pads are some kind of navigational hazard that’s always getting in the frogs’ way, and preventing them from getting their business done. That’s not true at all.

In the first place, lily pads are pretty soft to start with, and they’re floating on water besides. In any collision between a frog and a lily pad, the frog’s a lot more likely to hurt the lily pad than the other way around. And it’s not like they’re flying up out of nowhere and smacking those frogs on the butt—the frogs are actively seeking out the lily pads so they’ll have a place to sit. If it weren’t for the lily pads the frogs would just have to keep swimming all the time and I bet a lot of them would just give out and drown. The fact is they really enjoy sitting on those pads and even if they had wings I bet they’d still do it.

It’s like saying that if I had wings I wouldn’t bump my butt on the rocking chair in the living room. I wish I did have wings (Whew, no horse!) but if I did I guarantee you I’d still be sitting in that chair. Probably more than I do now, cause flying seems like it’d be pretty hard work. What do they think, I can just fly around all the time, day and night? Maybe when I was younger, but probably not even then, and certainly not now.

I’m happy to have that chair, and wings or no I’m going to be sitting in it every chance I get. And if I could sit on the lily pads I’d do that too, cause they look pretty comfortable. In fact, if I were a frog, or a really small person the size of a frog, I think it would be nice to just stretch out on a lily pad and take a nap, cause if you think about it they’re a lot like tiny little waterbeds. I wish I could nap on a lily pad (Whew, no horse!), but I’m much too heavy for them, at least the ones I’ve got out in the pond. I’ve read about giant lily pads they have in the Amazon that are plenty big enough to sleep on, but I’ve never really seen one. That’d be sweet! If I could fly around whenever I wanted and then take a nap on a lily pad, I don’t think I’d feel the least bit deprived for not having a horse. That’s what I’m gonna wish for, along with the usual stuff like money and Meg Ryan.

As far as that dyslogia goes, I’m feeling much better now.