The Wandering Classicist, Part I

Editor's note: I'm out of ideas for actual articles, so I'm trying something here. Is it any good?
(Probably not.) 

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The Wandering Classicist,

- or - 

The History of The World

(And yea! all that be upon it)

As elucidated by Fiends of Olde

("Because it's not old without the 'e'.")

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Part I: Beer with Gilgamesh

The weirdo was building a boat.

"It's an ark," he insisted. Hardly the point, I thought.

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In case you've never visited the city-states of Sumer (and you should! It's a party there!), there's probably one thing you should know. It's flat there. Flat and dry. A boat (or ark, or whatever) is about as useful there as, say, a gangsta-rapper. In other words, not at all.

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I mentioned it over the beer that night. It's about the high point of Sumerian technology. We could make beer. (Actually, the high points of Sumerian technology were probably writing and the wheel. But we preferred the beer. Wouldn't you?)

The guys all knew what was up with boats in the desert at once. They introduced me to some guy called Gilgamesh.

I'll spare you what he said. Y'all know exactly what's up with the boat-dude. Or at least you will, if I mention that his name was Noah. Apparently, Gilgamesh is one of those hero types who has nothing better to do than talk about the gods that he's killed and/or* slept with - and he's well accomplished enough that he can drag that on for hours and actually make it boring. (In my life, I've met far too many of these guys.) And apparently, Gilgamesh got into a Flood situation of sorts himself a while back.

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None of my Sumerian drinking buddies are worried, but they're just stupid. I'm not worried either. I don't die easy. You see, I'm not exactly human. I'm the Wandering Classicist. I was around when the universe was created (no, I can't tell you how. I promised.) and I'll be around when it ends. In the meantime, it's my job to gather classiness and information about classiness from every civilization in history (except the ones that aren't on Earth. I've got coworkers for that). Of course, there's not much classiness going on on Earth just now, so it's either get drunk in Sumer or research the first Emperors of China. I chose the beer. Can you blame me?

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So anyway, to make a long story short, it started raining. For forty days and forty nights. I was pretty wet, and, like most people, I prefer breathing to not breathing, but, unlike most people, it doesn't make much of a difference to me biologically. It's more of a comfort thing.

It really wasn't all that bad. There was plenty to drink (of course) and plenty of animal corpses to eat. There wasn't any beer, unfortunately, but so it goes.

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Join us in the future

For the second Installment

- of -

The Wandering Classicist

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*: Usually "or," not "and." Gilgamesh isn't really into killing people and then sleeping with them.