Saw this special about giraffes on the golf channel. In Africa a lot of your golf courses are built on savannas where most giraffes are taught very early in life how to caddy. Either that or they have to pay savanna roaming charges.

Giraffes are, shamefully, still restricted from joining a golf club so they have to give four weeks notice to reserve a tee time. Plus, a lot of your golf club manufacturers have completely ignored the giraffe market. Most pro shops stock only one or two 18-foot putters and seldom have any extra-and-I-do-mean-extra-tall sweat shirts in stock. Caddying is much less of a hassle.

So, anyway, the special focused on a giraffe who’d grown tired of the whole giraffe gig. Tired of the “tallest guy on the Serengeti” deal. Tired of hyenas saying “How’s the weather up there?” and then laughing like a hyena. Tired of getting those big neck ties at Christmas. Never once an electric train. Or an Alamo set with a miniature Davy Crockett and a little Santa Ana and teeny cannons and tiny dudes in coonskin caps.

Speaking of a big neck, they showed this giraffe at his brother-in-law’s weekly poker night. The game was jungle poker, where all cards are wild. (As you’d imagine, once the cards are dealt, it’s a zoo.) Afterwards, the brother-in-law showed a home-made stag movie called Long Neck. Very low class stuff. Fake special effects using cheap blow-up giraffe girls with too much lipstick and a brass giraffe the brother-in-law got at the Zimbabwe Mall.

On a real giraffe, by the way, a long neck just means it takes food longer to get down to the stomach. And on the topic of food, this one giraffe said if he saw one more acacia leaf he was going to barf. Which, as the documentary showed, takes forever to come up. Oh, and whenever a giraffe gets a sore throat, just opening up and saying “Ahhh” at the doctor’s office hurts “like an out-of-wedlock wildebeest.”

I think the narrator of the documentary, a retired spotted golfer, went too far in saying giraffes are pretty much just like us. It’s true, I will admit, that like the giraffe we often get tired of the same old same old after awhile. But look at the differences in how we and the giraffe react to ennui.

We tend to spend mucho dinero flying down to Disney World, or spend nada and knock over a snow cone stand. In other words we go thrill seeking because ordinary life is so unthrilling.

At Disney World we ride the water slide and go “Weeeeeee!” Or Goofy jumps out at us from behind a Mary Poppins statue and goes “Boogaloogalulu!” and we have to wee, so its back to the water slide. Then there are the nightmares about dogs ruling the world. To summarize: we are talking thrillingness up the yingo.

Or, if you knock over a snow cone stand, the snow melts before you get it home and the cops follow the trail of cherry syrup to your door and you get three to six in the can. Thrilling a-mundo barely covers it. To summarize: goodbye boredom.

But have you ever seen a single giraffe on a flight to Disney World? Have you ever seen a masked giraffe waiting in line at a snow cone stand? Do giraffes even know that if you’re robbing the place you get to go right up to the front of the line?

Of course not. You know what a bored giraffe finds thrilling? Heading out to the Serengeti plain to kick some lion butt. Hello? The last time I tried to kick a lion I ended up in a foreign emergency room with my butt seriously unbuttoned. Who wants to do that again? I mean, not only did they diagnose me with a sinus infection, they were out of network!

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2014, all rights reserved.