PORTLAND, Ore. — A local couple’s hike was put on hold after a really neat stick was found on the trail, blown away sources confirmed.
“Man this stick rules,” said chemical engineer and small branch enthusiast Greg Ware. “It was perfectly straight, no bumps or knots on it. It was about five feet tall, so it was perfect as a walking stick. I started spinning it around my head, pretending it was a sword. When my girlfriend Jenna told me to put it down so we could keep moving, I couldn’t hear her because I was too busy making lightsaber whooshing sounds and cutting down invisible stormtroopers. Sadly, while I was hitting it against a tree to get rid of the bark on it, the all-time great stick broke. Jenna didn’t understand why I had to take 15 minutes to mourn its loss.”
Although the stick provided Ware with a pleasant distraction, it was a source of great confusion for his girlfriend.
“This dipshit is always looking for sticks and I don’t get it,” said exasperated computer scientist Jenna Melman. “We were doing this long, exhausting hike, and it’s hot as hell. Greg just stops like he’s hit with a bolt of lightning and points at something in the distance before running off the trail to collect it. He was obsessed over it, he even called over guys who were hiking the other way, and they would take a full minute to gush over how cool the stick was. I shared a lot of annoyed looks with their girlfriends. It’s just a dead part of nature. Who cares? He kept talking about how he wanted to tie his pocket knife to the end in case a bear attacked us. Ugh.”
The desire for cool twigs and stems seems to be innate within men since time immemorial.
“For most of human history, survival was predicated on finding cool sticks,” explained evolutionary biologist Dr. Sandra Ryfield. “Ancient cavemen who found a good one were able to hunt with it. That hunting allowed them to find a mate and pass down their cool-stick-finding genes. The more cool sticks someone had, the greater their wealth was. Nowadays we don’t have such a need for sticks, but it is deeply ingrained in the human psyche to search for them. Also check out this one I found, it’s like a fuckin’ wizard’s staff.”
At press time, the hike was paused once again following the discovery of a really freaky bug.