What could be more fun than an outdoor barbecue? I can think of several things offhand, such as watching the secretary of state fall into a vat of untreated sewage. But that would probably cause us to go to war in Nicaragua or somewhere, so I guess we’ll have to settle for a barbecue.

The barbecue was invented more than eighty million years ago by Cro-Magnon Man, who was the son of Stephanie Cro and Eric Magnon, a primitive but liberated couple. Cro-Magnon Man used to eat dinosaur meat raw, and it tasted awful, worse than yogurt. One day, while Cro-Magnon Man was eating, lightning set a nearby log on fire. Cro-Magnon Man was so surprised that he dropped his dinosaur meat onto the fire, where it ignited and gave off a disgusting odor that drove off all the insects, which in those days were the size of mature eggplants and extremely vicious. “This is terrific,” said Cro-Magnon Man, only nobody understood him because English hadn’t been invented yet.

Burning dinosaurs quickly became a major form of insect control. At large Cro-Magnon lawn parties, the hosts would put whole brontosauruses on the fire, and they would sizzle into the night, keeping the insects away and giving off a stench that lingers to this very day at the northern end of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Eventually, of course, they used up all the dinosaurs, which led to the discovery that if you put cows and pigs on your fire, you could not only drive away insects but in a pinch you could also eat the cows and pigs. This led to the invention of hamburgers and hot dogs, which are cows and pigs that have been ground up in Chicago and formed into little portable units that can be easily thrown on a fire. Today people rarely put entire cows on fires except in Texas, where lifting animals is a major cultural activity, second only to wearing big hats.

To hold your outdoor barbecue, you’ll need several dozen units of cow or pig and a portable grill, or hibachi. (“Hibachi” is a Japanese word meaning extremely flimsy grills that break at the slightest touch but Americans buy them anyway.”) You’ll also need fuel. At one time, people used wood, but then the Consumer Product Safety Commission discovered that wood is flammable and banned it. So today you are required to use charcoal, a mineral that forms in torn paper bags in supermarkets. The problem, of course, is that charcoal, being a mineral, does not burn. Neither does charcoal lighter fluid. Firemen routinely use charcoal lighter fluid to extinguish major refinery fires. So what actually heats your barbecue food is matches, hundreds and hundreds of matches that you heap onto your charcoal until they form a blaze.

While you’re waiting for your matches to get going, you should prepare a tangy barbecue sauce.

TANGY BARBECUE SAUCE RECIPE

1 cup broached onions 2 liters vanilla abstract 1/2 pound neat’s-foot oil 2 table-spoons butter or oregano 1 fresh poltroon, diced

To Prepare

With floured hands, on a floured surface, standing on a floured floor, and just generally surrounded by mounds and mounds of flour, combine the ingredients in a greased 5518’ by 16318’ pan, then pour the mixture carefully into an ungreased 4318’ by 18718’ pan and heat it until a 1318’ blister forms when you stick your hand into it.

Now place your meat units on the grill. They should burst into flames immediately. Let them burn until they’re cooked the way you like them:

RARE (5-10 minutes): The outside is burnt and welded to the grill; the inside is pink and swirling with cow and pig disease germs.

MEDIUM (5-10 minutes): The outside and part of the inside are burnt; many of the disease germs, particularly the elderly and pregnant ones, are dying slow, painful deaths.

WELL DONE (5-10 minutes): Both the outside and the inside are completely burnt; almost all the disease germs are dead, and the few remaining ones are making elaborate plans for revenge.

When your meat is done, extinguish it with the barbecue sauce or charcoal lighter, detach it from the grill with a spatula or sharp chisel, and serve it with something that people can eat, such as Fritos or turkey sandwiches. You should eat quickly, because the insects will monitor you from a safe distance and attack the instant the smoke clears.

Almost all housework is hard and dangerous, involving the insides of ovens and toilets and the cracks between bathroom tiles, where plague germs fester. The only housework that is easy and satisfying is the kind where you spray chemicals on wooden furniture and smear them around until the wood looks shiny. This is the kind of housework they show on television commercials: A professional actress, posing as the Cheerful Housewife (IQ 43), dances around her house, smearing and shining, smearing and shining, until before she knows it her housework is done and she is free to spend the rest of the afternoon reading the bust-development ads in Cosmopolitan magazine. She never cleans her toilets. When they get dirty, she just gets another house. Lord knows they pay her enough.

Most of us would rather smear and shine than actually clean anything. For example, our house has a semifinished basement, which means it looks too much like a finished room to store old tires in, but too much like a basement to actually live in. Our semifinished basement has a semibathroom, and one time, several years ago, a small woodland creature crept into the house in the middle of the night and died in the shower stall. This is common behavior in the animal world: many animals, when in danger, are driven by instinct to seek refuge in shower stalls.

Since we hardly ever go down to our semifinished basement, we didn’t discover the dead woodland creature until several weeks after it crept in, at which time it was getting fairly ripe. Now obviously, the correct thing to do was clean it up, but this is the hard kind of housework. So instead we stayed upstairs and went into an absolute frenzy of smearing and shining, until you could not walk into our living room without wearing sunglasses, for fear of being blinded by the glare off the woodwork. Eventually, we managed to block the woodland creature out of our minds.

Several months later, our friend Rob, who is a doctor, came to visit. He stayed in our semifinished basement, but we noticed that he came upstairs to take showers. One of the first things they teach you in medical school is never to take a shower with a dead woodland creature. We were so embarrassed that we went down and cleaned up the shower stall, with a shovel and acid. But I doubt we’d have done it if Rob hadn’t been there.

Our behavior is not unique. People have been avoiding housework for millions of years. Primitive man would stay in one cave until the floor was littered with stegosaurus bones and the walls were covered with primitive drawings, which were drawn by primitive children when their parents went out to dinner, and then the family would move to a new cave, to avoid cleaning the old one. That’s how primitive man eventually got to North America.

In North America, primitive man started running out of clean caves, and he realized that somebody was going to have to start doing housework. He thought about it long and hard, and finally settled on primitive woman. But he needed an excuse to get himself out of doing the housework, so he invented civilization. Primitive woman would say: “How about staying in the cave and helping with the housework today?” And primitive man would say: “I can’t, dear: I have to invent fire.” Or: “I’d love to, dear, but I think it’s more important that I devise some form of written language.” And off he’d go, leaving the woman with the real work.

Over the years, men came up with thousands of excuses for not doing housework—wars, religion, pyramids, the United States Senate—until finally they hit on the ultimate excuse: business. They built thousands of offices and factories, and every day, all over the country, they’d get up, eat breakfast, and announce: “Well, I’m off to my office or factory now.” Then they’d just leave, and they wouldn’t return until the house was all cleaned up and dinner was ready.