Yo, they’ve discovered water on Mars. I know. You may not give a hoot (in spite of our moral obligation to give hoots when hootful events occur. “Water discovered on Mars” is just a step above “Meteor bounces off Trump’s hair, squashes Congress ” on the most current, hoot surrender list.)

You may not care about a suddenly squishy Mars. Your life is too busy, what with unbelievable discounts at Costco; wars breaking out everywhere and none remotely as interesting as an episode of Umpire or Son-of-a-bitching Executioner or Fear the Walking Alive.

Maybe you’ve got movies to catch up on, ants in your pantry and/or the Spanish Inquisition at your front door. How about a pound of wet spaghetti thrown down your garbage hole and now clogging your plumbing?

Almost as if you’d swallowed the entire plate of spaghetti and meat-a-balls last night and are anxiously dialing Plumb Bob’s emergency tunnel boring service and/or sending hubby out for Extra Strength Intest-o-reamer, now with Acela Express.

Perhaps I misjudge. Perhaps I misjudge a lot. Perhaps everyday, sometimes every hour. Frankly or even Pope Frankly, I, perhaps, don’t give a poop. But I always give a hoot its due.

So, here’s what water on Mars means.

Soon there will be lawns on Mars, which means soon we will see crews in Mars Rovers hauling trailers of enormous ride-on mowers with bump-out living rooms and little laminated tables for playing Canasta.

Which means soon there will be gardens on Mars which will require husbands, on hands and knees and aching backs, to do the weeding on Saturdays.

Which means there will be leaf blowers on Mars, which means there will be losers on Mars. Not sure if there will be leaves, or trees, but there’s always something or someone who needs blowing. Besides, leaf blowers are just music to my rear.

This means there will be proctologists on Mars and golf courses for them to use instead of healing your proc. Which means there will be weekends and football and wide screen TVs and snacks like deflated hot dogs, beer nuts, beer zwieback, circus peanuts, cheesy commercials and billions of Mars bucks in somebody’s wallet.

That means there will be banks on Mars and bankers and lawyers and stockbrokers and day trading, night trading and horse trading. Yes, there will be horses on Mars, but only for the bankers, billionaires and horses asses.

No planet worth its water can survive without skylines and slums and depleted forests and plutonium and plastic hair. So Mars will welcome developers, oil drillers, ice cream trucks that play Christmas music in July, the slick and the sleazy, to carve up the soil and build palaces, shopping malls, casinos, machine gun works and a school or two where proper machine gun handling can be taught at an early age.

Because, with or without water there will be Native Martians with ray guns and three to seven eyes who will steal our women and eat us and then try to figure out what the leaf blower is for.

Which means soon there will be crime on Mars and 18 different kinds of cops, each with its own SWAT team and armored division. Also, one or two brooding, suicidal, Stockholm homicide detectives and novels called “The Martian girl with the Swedish meatball tattoo.”

And before you know it, Mars will go to hell. But hey, it’s only Mars. We’ve still got good old reliable earth with plenty of water, and decades of useful life yet to burn.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2015, all rights reserved.