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The Human Tumbleweed grew bored and bumped and bounced his fat roly-poly ass right out of the circus, zipping out of his tent under the ringmaster’s nose. The bearded lady bid him a tearful adieu. The sickly lions saluted his courage. For the world outside the circus wasn’t all sunshine and craft beers and easy paychecks. The lions knew better. They’d grown up on the scrappy Savannah back when Sudan was one country. Back when there were still elephants. They’d seen the damage. Lived it. But the Human Tumbleweed ignored their advice. He was an anthropocentric little runt raised on bad philosophy whose parentage remained a mystery. As far as he remembered he was a tumbleweed: fat, round, triple-jointed and born to roll. Yes, he was a tumbleweed but the human remained a crucial part of his title. Thus, he rolled on most humanly, surveying man’s finest structures, bridges and skyscrapers, lapping up the lifestyles of the rich, the famous, the elegant, the sublime. But he was thorough. Neglected neither slums nor strip malls. He tumbled across the dark spaces man had made, ravines full of trash, plastic seas, mass graves, forgotten landmines. Sleepless, ceaseless—he rolled. Through oil fields. Through sewers. Through rubber plantations. Until he was coated with a sticky, gummy grime stronger than the best adhesives concocted by 3M. Hence the world in all its multifarity began to cling to him. He picked up litter at first. Then trees. Boulders. Cars. Streets. People. Houses. Armies. Genocides. Nations. Cultures. Myths. Religions. Histories. He tumbled and grew, absorbing all that crossed his path, circling the world like this over and over again until this little earth was nothing but a burr on his outer skin and he could no longer remember who he was or why he tumbled. Yet on he went, slave to a mysterious propulsion, tumbling to greener, galactic pastures, absorbing asteroids, alien species, planets, suns, other galaxies, on and on until nothing remained but the Human Tumbleweed adorned with all that he’d absorbed and the void he’d created in his wake.
At least this is one theory put forth by scholars hypothesizing how our universe began. They’ve written treatises about the Human Tumbleweed supported, they claim, by incontrovertible proofs. Satellite imagery. Complex equations. Evidence both deductive and empirical. They say he eventually, inevitably, slowed, turned inert, and decayed. They say his rotting corpse, like whale carcasses giving life to all manner of critters when they sink down to the ocean floor, seeded the universe we know today. Respected theologians, citing this science, have predicted his return someday. They say the Human Tumbleweed will roll again. But skeptics have dismissed this as pure hokum. The pinnacle of human hubris. As if they can’t admit to themselves, or even entertain the notion, that at the heart of the universe lies something human, born from a circus, and fueled by nothing but boredom.
