The History of History

While most people question from time to time the history of this or the history of that, few ever dislodge their heads from the collective bunghole long enough to ponder the history of history itself. How did we remember the past in the past, and why? The answer may rip your head off and crap down your throat.

The first histories on record were verbal, stories passed down from generation to generation like the one about the time uncle Henry beaned that hooker with a croquet mallet. This system worked fairly well for centuries, in spite of the complete lack of accuracy inherent in passing along history through a gigantic game of "telephone." Stories morphed over time until they bore no resemblance whatsoever to the originals, usually picking up fire-breathing dragons, large-breasted women and leprechauns along the way.

Then came pictographs, first in prehistoric, then in Egyptian times. These didn't help at all, and actually set the cause of history back 500 years because most people drew like shit. The ancient Sumerians actually believed that their ancestors rode around on giant dogs, just because their ancestors were so lousy at drawing horses.

Eventually, history yielded to the forces of progress and drawings were phased out in favor of songs. This ended up being only a marginal improvement, however, when it turned out that most people were lousy at writing songs as well. Most of the recorded history of ancient France has to do with cold-hearted women who up and left their men. In all likelihood, great wars were fought, technologies advanced, and other hard-to-rhyme subjects of note came up during this era, but we'll always have to guess at the details since no one could come up with any catchy songs commemorating these events.

Song-recorded history also posed the problem of popularity, as people often knew a great deal about the history behind songs they liked and wanted to hear again and again, but very little about the lame or sappy songs they thought blew. As a result, children in China in the 18th century B.C. knew everything there was to know about the time Willie Finch nailed his pecker to a tree, but next to nothing about the fall of the Xia dynasty. The dynasty's fall certainly made its way into a fair number of songs, but since the best of these was the bloated, pretentious "Tall Fall," the children never really had a chance.

Of course, similar problems exist today, since most American schoolchildren are at a loss to explain the purpose of the Bill of Rights, but have completely memorized the Meow Mix commercial and are quite familiar with Snoop Dogg's favorite sexual position.

By 1700 B.C. writing had been invented, which helped matters greatly except in areas afflicted by messy handwriting. Most of the history of Persia pre-600 B.C. remains a mystery due to the sloppy, lackadaisical hand of the day. Early writing was merely a streamlined version of pictographs strung together in sentences like "Me you seagulls two dogs fucking house buffalo."

Even after writing-down had become the widely accepted standard for historical recording, there still remained the question of how to store what had been written for the ages. The early practice of tattooing historical texts onto fat people gave way after it was realized that these corpulent canvases were literally taking history with them to their graves, and paper was adopted around 12oo B.C. But this helped matters little as historians discovered that books are heavy, and usually get lost every time you move. Also, paper was considered a delicacy by deer and the undereducated, so keeping starving people and wildlife out of your library became a full-time occupation.

Finally, someone realized you could just write history on a slip of paper, drop it into a bottle, and huck it into the ocean, at which point someone would eventually find it and learn about history. This solved several problems since deer can't operate bottle openers and starving people don't float. This practice exploded soon after the invention of the bottle in China in 12 A.D. The bottle was originally created as a musical instrument, before first being used to hold beverages in 13 A.D., after an extremely drunk man accidentally drank the spit collected at the bottom of a bottle-player's instrument after a particularly spirited performance. In spite of this experience, people somehow still decided to use bottles for drinking.

The first "message in a bottle" was invented after an unnamed Chinese man, who for some reason was carrying his grocery list in his mouth, accidentally dropped it into a half-full bottle of beer and couldn't get it back out. In frustration, he hurled the bottle into the ocean, where it remained until washing up on shore two years later. The man who found it, Yung Si-Bong, took his discovery as a message from God that he should go out into the world and find two-dozen eggs and a quart of goat milk. He told friends and family the story of his message from God, and before the day was done, the entire village was hucking message-filled bottles into the sea, hoping to hilariously fool morons like Yung Si-Bong.

Gradually, historians would migrate back to books, after the entire Pacific Ocean became clogged with bottles around 200 A.D. and swimmers had to wear chain mail to keep from being torn to shreds by all the broken glass, which incidentally contributed to China's 100% drowning rate in those days. But the main driving factor in the move back to book-written history was the development of new inks that didn't smell like a dying frog's balls. China's original inks were made from a blend of soot from pine smoke and fish-egg lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and wolverine musk. Around 230 A.D., the Chinese discovered that you could make ink out of soot alone, and that all the other ingredients had been thrown in originally just to get them out of the house.

Sadly, paper wouldn't make its debut in Europe until the fifteenth century, when Europeans were finally able to end the laborious practice of finger-painting their history on the walls with baked monkey feces. The Europeans were at first resistant to give up their shit-smearing ways, but quickly relented when they discovered that paper is delicious.

In modern days, thanks to the advent of the Internet, we've done away with paper altogether and have returned to the ways of our forefathers with a verbal history tradition, usually carried on something like "I read on the Internet that they've still got Napoleon's dong in a jar inside somebody's freezer in Hoboken." But you know what they say about being doomed to repeat history. I'm just kidding, I know you don't.

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