COLUMN: I’m a Clone, and So Am I
Ever since that Scottish sheep cloning thing – which made history for going faster to a Little Caesar’s Pizza commercial than it did the scientific journals – people have been gasping with horror about the sinister possibilities of this technology being used on humans. Some governments have even tried to pass laws against it. Too late.
Hey! Wake up and smell the DNA. The gene pool is getting a little thin already and the resultant clonal humanoids are all around us. Been around any teenagers lately? Driven through any housing developments? We love cloning. We don’t call ourselves the “melting pot” for nothing.
Everybody has a Coke and a pair of Nikes. We have 9-year-old kids in Japan who want to look like LeBron. There are at least 3,000 women in town who are trying to look like one of the cast members of “Friends.”
Just the fact that I made that previous statement shows that advertising and marketing have won. Cloning is inescapable and subconscious. I’m not even trying to look like anybody, and people keep mistaking me for someone else. And, I’m getting to the age and general-used merchandise appearance that makes me pretty sure people aren’t saying these things just to gain my affections. I have traveled from El Paso to Seattle and a lot of map specks in between, and every place I go people say, “Don’t I know you?”
“No, just passing through,” I say.
“No? Well, are you sure you don’t have a brother in Missoula?” they add.
“Nope, just another guy with a pony tail and that disaffected look that is so popular these days,” I counter. And “No, my dad was not a traveling salesman.”
And this would be of no particular consequence, but it keeps getting weirder.
I’m sitting across from a guy in the Maui airport who keeps starring at me.
“Aren’t you that guy on TV?” he finally says.
“What guy?” I ask.
“Oh, you know, on that show?” he presses on.
I mean, this could be flattering, but the guy who is asking these questions is holding a box full of chicken feathers on his lap. I know, because I made the mistake of asking him in a failed attempt to change the subject.
He told me he just thought “they were pretty” and he is taking them home.
Remember, we are in Hawaii and most people take home exotic flowers, macadamia nuts and sun burns.
“Oh come on, you are the one on TV, right?” he asks for the third time.
“Nope, sorry, just another guy who was able to squeeze out enough frequent-flyer miles to get to Hawaii,” I say.
“Oh no, you are that guy on that show,” he says as I walk away muttering.
The gene pool is thinning faster than Jack Nicholson’s hair and it has turned into one big all-night bus station with a seedy cast of dangerously close-to-inbred characters. Our melting pot runneth over.
Comments can be sent to dhinkamp@msn.com.