Atrophied Brains

Have you ever had a broken limb?
Arm or leg I mean, not trees or bushes.
I broke my arm once when I was young. Had a motorcycle that I drove around and around and around the neighborhood so that I could irritate everyone. I was too young for a car and the scooter was like a space shuttle to the fourteen year old me who never even had a decent bicycle before that.

If it wasn't for the concrete construction of the roads,I would have worn a path so deep that a river could have started up there.

Well there was this dog that liked to chase me when he got the chance and usually I would just twist my wrist and zip like a rocket to get away from him. Once, when I wasn't paying attention, that dog shot out from under some parked cars and, like a little brown cannon ball he streaked right into my front wheel. I reacted stupidly (a common fourteen year old way to react) by hitting the front break and the dog at the same time.

Even though I hadn't yet learned about inertia of motion,I performed it well. I dove head first over the handle bars and landed on the concrete street using my forearm to break the fall. I also broke the arm.

They put it in a cast. The old type cast which weighed a hundred pounds and which sealed your limb in a tomb for a month or two. The old typec ast where everyone in school had to write things on it and you couldn't take a shower without protecting it in someway. The old type cast where, if someone didn't like you, they would mention itching.

When they took the cast off - I couldn't believe that was my arm! It was ugly. All peely and nasty and skinny and shriveled. It looked like a carrot that had spent a thousand days in the fridge. It was easy to see that, if your arm is wrapped up and kept out of the sun and kept out of use for any length of time, it would lose most of its health. It was clear that, if you left it wrapped up and out of use for, say, years, then it would shrivel up and become almost useless. It would atrophy.

That's our problem with traffic nowadays. And politics. And so many other things that we need to blame things on. Atrophied brains.

You get these people who probably did all they were expected in the way of normal education and then stopped. They haven't done a damnit thing to exercise their thought processers for over thirty years. They sit with their brain encased in an impenetrable cast that weighs a hundred pounds and seals them up like tombs.

That little old man in front of you driving twelve miles an hour down the interstate has lived for the last ninety years and the only mental exercise he's done is watch television and read the funnies. Next time you're in the grocery store and you stop to let the little old lady go by - and SHE STOPS right in front of you to look at the peanut butter. Check her out closely. She's got it - you can tell; she has atrophied brain!

They don't have to be old either. You can get this devastating syndrome early in life too, its just a matter of when you put the cast on your mind. If you're one of those who doesn't read directions. If you refuse to read maps, books, articles under the headlines or all the little bitty words they put on your insurance forms, then you too could be a candidate for atrophied brain.

Don't let it take you down! Don't become a walking vegetable with your mouth hung open and your face all dumbed out. READ! Study something! Take a class! Please Please Please don't grow down and develop an atrophied brain!