Neighbors packing to skip out on
their rent woke me with annoying noise at 4:00 AM. After tossing about the bed for fifteen
minutes, or so, Smokey and I got up to begin the day.
To drown out the snoring from my
still-sleeping sainted wife, I switched on the television.
World news berating President
Trump for inching closer to world peace forced me to surf through the remaining
914 satellite channels desperately searching for something to watch. Pickin’s were slim.
Eventually, after developing a
callous on my channel button thumb, I discovered I received something called
Animal Planet, aka.: APL.
APL is critter-oriented with
shows about everything from gerbils to whatever eats them and what eats the
eaters.
The show had already begun when I
came upon a guy with a British accent in search of the elusive “gbanai.”
According to repeated recaps, a
gbanai is a seldom seen aquatic creature that lives on the land, floats on the
water, has lots of teeth, and eats well.
This expedition was being conducted in a location I missed because of my
thumb cramp causing me to miss the opening information. Evidently, this gbanai thing is a living
dinosaur. Wow!
This British fellow was making
his way down some sort of river that closely resembled a cesspool – chocolate
colored water with debris that could have popped out of a garbage
disposal. He was seated in an inflatable
rubber raft.
The description of this gbanai
called to mind a crocodile, but I’m certain the drama level would be far less
if a spade was actually called a spade.
This guy and his entourage
stopped to spend the night on land with a witness who had seen this gbanai
thing on several different occasions. In
pretty good English, this jungle dweller explained they needed to travel another
hour down-river to reach the infamous gbanai home turf.
At the crack of dawn, the crew
was making their way through swirling dirty eddies in primitive canoes and that
previously-mentioned pool toy. Of
course, one of the canoes sprung a leak, sinking the already questionable
vessel along with some cameras and cheez crackers.
This river parade continued in
the name of science.
In between the four-minute
portions of the show were interlaced countless five-minute commercials for the
SPCA, trying to guilt viewers into submitting only $20 per month to save
starving, mistreated animals.
Realizing this show could have
been run in roughly a third of the time, I began thinking about the reality of
this reality program.
Since I am a news junkie, I catch
copious amounts of information on pretty much everything, including royal
weddings and cashew farm watering regulations.
 |
| Maybe a gbanai? Maybe not. |
In all my years I have never
heard of the discovery of a gbanai, or any dinosaur, by a British man, in some
third-world country. I’m certain even
the New York Times couldn’t suppress that news.
It was an epiphany that I had
been duped into wasting all this time watching and waiting for a bunch of
hapless river hunters look for a crocodile.
I switched it off promising
myself to never watch another one of these half-baked sensational shows.
You’ll need to excuse me because
now I’m looking for an educational program on bigfoot.
