I love my Dad, but I am afraid I have become him. I have inherited his utter cluelessness and inability to grow up. I told you that to tell you this.

In the time before Wii, all the best electronic games were played on the computer. One of the games I liked was a game called Sim Earth.

In Sim Earth, you start with a raw planet and you build a civilization. So I built towns, started agriculture, built cities and industrial centers, and invented the Internet. After about a month or so I had a thriving peaceful world going.

And my Dad came to visit.

He said one night at dinner,

“I found this game on your computer. It was this land of farmers and things. Did you know there was a nuclear bomb control? It was very realistic. I mean you bomb a city and it tells you nothing can live or grow there for 80 years. Man, I bombed that planet back to the Stone Age. Planet of the Cockroaches. I saved it for you so you can see it.”

Ahem. (tap, tap, tap, for those of you who know EFT)

Where were we? Ah yes, Mousapotamia.

In the beginning there was nothing but energy and cosmic stuff. And all that energy and cosmic stuff was made up of Beings of Light and Love. Everything created was created by thought.

Then one Being of Light and Love had the idea of Mousapotamia. Other Beings of Light and Love got on board and wanted to express themselves. Some became rocks, some became trees, some became mice and others became ricker-fracking mosquitoes.

Over the course of many incarnations where Beings of Light and Love took turns experiencing life as birds and bushes and things, mice became the ideal of what life on Mousapotamia was like. Soon the races of Drudgemice and Lemmings had created the Giant Maze.

At first the Giant Maze was a lot of fun, but as it became more and more crowded, life became a path of struggle to get to a dead end. Droppings piled up until it seemed the only solution was to burn them for energy. But burning them was very smelly.

Several white mice protested the burning of droppings, claiming that the smoke would eventually kill them all, but the Drudgemince had become dependent on poop for energy. When the white mice became too annoying, the Drudgemice passed laws to make speaking of such things illegal.

It was about this time that bats started to emerge. Bats could fly above the maze and see its limitations. They told of the wonders that existed outside the Maze.

Drudgemice diggers uncovered the ruins of an ancient race called the Screaming Gerbils. The Gerbils were clock makers who saw the Universe as a giant clock. They saw that the Universe clock, like all things, had a cycle and the Universe was winding down. They carved the cycles of the Universal clock into a wedge of cheese, and had the wedge plated with gold.

When it was deciphered, the Golden Wedgie, as it was called, revealed that not only was the Universal Clock running down, it had in fact, run out. According to the Golden Wedgie, Mousapotamia was doomed. This fact was largely ignored by Drudgemice and Lemmings. The White Mice were alarmed and saw it as proof that the burning of poop had destroyed them all. The Bats saw it as movement away from the era of the Giant Maze to new age of Cheese and Crackers.

And that is how it stands today.

“So Spacemouse,” someone asks, “if you lived in Mouseapotamia, would you be a Drudgemouse, Lemming, White Mouse, Screaming Gerbil, or a Bat?”

I would be Spacemouse, I’d answer. I’d remember that I was a Being of Light and Love and that my thoughts create who and what I am. The Drudgemice see and think only the idea of the Maze, and therefore believe that there is nothing more than the Maze. The White Mice see and think the idea of destruction and so they live in fear. The Bats see and think the idea of the coming of the Days of Cheese and Crackers, and live with the expectation of happiness when it comes.

I’d rather be happy right here right now, and not wait for days of Cheese and Crackers.

Now let me finish this blog, so I can make a cheese sandwich. Maybe after that I’ll go release some giant spiders into my son’s Animal Crossing game.

What do you think? What kind of mouse would you be?

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(c) 2011 Chip Engelmann