Wouldn’t it be heinous if we all turned into toads, just overnight, sort of thing? If we all woke up, and we were toads, only we had no idea how to live as toads? We’d be hopping about like a load of warty gabshites, not wanting to eat our bugs. Most of us would die of being stuck indoors. We’d dry and we’d starve, and be mummified toads on our floors. We’d be these…sad heaps of old leather purses, all huddled together in our corners.

My parents used to send me to church camp in the summers, which was funny, as we never went to church. I don’t know. Maybe it was cheaper than regular camp. Anyway, there was a song involved, a camp song, and it went like this:

♫ I just wanna be a sheep. Baa, baa. ♪
♫ I just wanna be a sheep. Baa, baa. ♪
♫ I don’t want to be a Pharisee. ♪
♫ Because they are not fair, you see. ♪
♫ I just wanna be a sheep. Baa, baa. ♪

I mean, I didn’t say it was a good song. But there was a song. And I’m feeling it today. I don’t want to be a toad (croak, croak).

The other thing, if you were a toad—if you were fortunate enough to become one in a toad-rich environment, in an outdoor sort of milieu—would proper toads prove welcoming? Could you hop right up, like “hello, fellow toad,” or would they know you for a fraud? (I almost wrote “froad” right there.) Would you have to spend your whole toady life doing a fake toady accent, knowing the other toads saw right through you? Would you get the worst bugs at the toadmas feast, and a bad rate on your auto loan? (Because toads do love their motorcars. Poop-poop.)

If I had to wake up and be a toad, I suppose I’d want it to happen somewhere pleasant, with no birds, and maybe one or two real toads. Like a high mountain lake where I’d hibernate in the mud most of the year. The other toads would be so lonely they’d have to include me, and I wouldn’t get swallowed by a heron. Every summer, I’d bake on a rock and wait for the bugs to come to me. That’d be the best way to be a toad.

This has been a test of the emergency toad metamorphosis system. If this were a real toadpocalypse, we’d all be—

—grubbit. Bronk.