We Want A Rock

I'm really about to confirm my dork status by admitting that I used to listen to They Might Be Giants on my way to school as a sophomore more times than not. How my sister survived? I have no idea.

Most of their lyrics perplexed me, including the line : "Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." What were they talking about? I tried to envision this, but it still seemed ridiculous, which is probably their goal for every song anyhow.

Well, I got away from listen to their whiny music years ago, but couldn't help but have that "rock" song come back and stick itself in my head when at three different times over the course of just a few days, I found myself wanting a rock to wind a piece of string (well, actually rope) around.

The first time was to hang food in a tree so that bears wouldn't be able to get into it. To do this, a rock is needed to weight one end of rope as it is thrown over a tree limb. This way, while you hold onto the unweighted end, the other side falls down, rather than getting stuck at an unreachable height.

The next time rocks were needed involved anchoring a kayak. With tidal changes of almost 20 feet(!), it was crucial to have a large rock to tie the kayak's tether around. The rock had to be substantial, but not too heavy, since the tide required my moving the anchor every few minutes to keep the kayak from either beaching or being swept away.

The final time a rock was called upon for duty was when Rob tried to shore fish with a spinner rod. The strong tidal pulls grabbed the line too easily if left out unweighted, so he improvised by winding his line around a couple of stones. It didn't catch us anything, but a least it gave me a third example for this posting which is important since three is the magic number.

The rock mystery is now solved. Now I just have to figure out what they mean by: "Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads".