Military life is tough on the body. After a career in the Navy my knees are shot from standing watches on steel decks and my eyes are bad from watching for periscopes and fishing boats in the Indian Ocean. A lot of my buddies have lost a lot of hearing from jet engine noise.
I was expecting all that.
What I wasn’t expecting was for my head to cave in. I can’t be sure because for a large part of my life I had hair, but now that I sport the “shaved” look, I can see a definite dent in my skull.
This can only come from two causes. Maybe it got dented playing football or banging it on a hatch. That could be, but maybe it is because my brain is shrinking.
I think it is option number 2.
With a retreating cerebrum, the skull, having nothing upon which to rest, will sag (theoretically). Or maybe the shrinking brain creates some kind of vacuum that is sucking the bones in my head inward.
There are some other questions that must be asked, too. For one, did the dumbing down process begin while I was in the military, or did it start once I LEFT?
Maybe cartooning is the culprit!
Come to think of it, I know a lot of cartoonists and…let’s just say quantum physics doesn’t come up in conversation very often. I’ll be going to the annual Reuben Awards (an awards convention for cartoonists) in about a month, and you can be sure I’ll be looking at skulls while I’m there. If my hunch is correct, there will be more than a few dented heads in the room.
If I am wrong, I can only conclude that it is the military’s fault.
Anyone with half a brain could figure that out.
