The Club

Prompt: The Club  |  Genre: Comical Autobiography(?) |  Word count: 750 words exactly

A long, long time ago... there was a club.

It was long, was narrow at the base, and grew broader along the way until it ended abruptly at the head.

In those days, it used to be made of wood. Not that somebody actually made it. It was just discovered one day. Like gravity, many centuries later.

Or maybe not like gravity. More like, the spectacles hiding atop your nose; you know it’s somewhere around, but you just can’t seem to find it, until somebody points it out to you.

That’s exactly what happened to the caveman. He was happily digging his nose while a sabre-toothed tiger was staring at him from a distance and licking its chops. The cavewoman, on the other hand, held on to their baby dearly and was frantically trying to signal the caveman of the impending danger.
The stubborn snot, however, seemed to have caught his attention far more than his annoying, baby-carrying, smelly partner. Which is why the caveman didn’t see it coming—a large thump on his head with something hard, heavy and rough at the same time.

This was the first-ever recorded use of the club.

We don’t know exactly what happened to the sabre-tooth; quite likely it ran away from the resounding sound of the head bash. That seems to be the only likelihood because experts have found a cave painting depicting the scene. You could argue that it could have been painted by a spectator, but sabre-toothed tigers were not known to leave any witnesses behind.

It is also speculated that the idiom “Empty vessels make more noise” may have originated from this event, but no one has yet found any conclusive evidence.

Since that event, the club was used for many different purposes—as a weapon to hunt animals; a toy for over-active, aggressive children (reference: Bam-bam of Flinstones); a mediating tool for spouses; a flea-thrasher for clothes made of animal skins... the list was endless. Before the wheel, the club was arguably mankind’s greatest invention.

Over the centuries, the club has been remodelled and reinvented beyond recognition. It grew smoother with a rounder head and was later made entirely of metal. Experts believe that the battering ram and the mace—two Mid-evil weapons—were close relatives of the club.

Though the club—and its derivatives—had enjoyed great popularity over centuries, mankind gradually lost its fascination with blunt, bone-crushing tools of death, and preferred more bloody, excruciatingly painful, flesh-tearing tools.

Like the sword.

The charm of the sword reached a zenith with the entry of King Arthur and his Knights. Girls swooned over the sight of it and men brandished it, as they continue to brandish not-so-subtle signs of manhood. Ballads were written and sung about it, great epics were woven around it, and many men died playing with it.

The sword was later replaced with a gun, and it became the new symbol of manhood: something that was loud, quick, distant, violent and loved destroying life on a large scale.

Who needed the club when you had the gun? But the club was far from dead. All it needed was a new avatar.

And thus was born the weapon of the new-age businessman—the golf club. You’d think golf was a sport. And you’d be right to think so too. But the true root of this sport was the first club that was ever wielded, and that club had one and only one purpose: to thump an empty head and make it listen to you.

But the true reinvention of the club came in the form of bowling pins. It is believed that this sport was invented by a group of empty heads who got together to find a way to get back at the club that had thumped their heads over the millennia. There they were, gulping down cans of beer, which they then piled one atop the other only to topple them all down with a poorly-aimed ball, all the while thinking bitterly of the clubs waiting to meet their heads sooner than later... when eureka! they found bowling!

This reversed its role completely! The club now took the hits while the hard, empty ball delivered it.

Experts believe that this could be one of the reasons the current generation has likely grown stupider than its predecessors. The theory requires more empirical evidence gathered over generations, but by then, it might be too late to recover from the brain loss—we might all end up as cavemen and come a full circle.