What are we? Mere bags of animated meat and bone with a brain on top. I was listening to a song on the radio recently. The radio is there to console you somehow regarding the inevitable sadness of being a perishable bag of meat. The radio sings of love. "We'll be together for a million years" says a popular song. The guy promises to dry her tears. Nice little promise for a human primate, most relationships don't last more than five or six. Imagine having the same old lady for a million years? You won't live more than say 100 years. And your best years are already behind you already, as your body runs down and eventually jams to a halt. It will happen, you fool, and sooner than you think, probably.
In my case, Valentines Day passed without much thought to love or sex. I got 99 problems and this ain't one. There is something fundamentally false and delusional about all this talk of love. Humans are as programmed in their way as a bower bird. And I guess ultimately love is a matter of finding someone else to do a nasty with for a while. Then you get tired of doing that and go off to watch TV or something.
I do find other humans interesting however. It keeps me away from thoughts of eternity and those long stretches of existence where one is not where one wants to be and where one is not with people one wants to be with. I try to live in the moment, I really do, because all too soon I'll be dead and rotting, and so will you be. That is what God wants. You are only on the earth for a while and then time's up. Long enough to think, hey, this isn't so bad, and then it's February and you are just trying to keep warm and waiting for spring. All of life is a matter of anticipation. While at work I'm anticipating the hour, the moment when I'll be able to quit and go home. In the meantime I am swimming in the ocean of time and monitoring internal and external cues. Looking forward to my next meal, my next bag of peanuts and my next visit to the toilet. As long as things keep going in one end and out the other, with predictable regularity I am okay. It is when things seem to be making a precipitous exit from both ends that I am troubled but that seldom happens. Body and soul are held together with duct tape sometimes. You do what you have to do.
For example it is dark outside and I really should be asleep, but I'm not asleep and time marches on. For some reason I can't get all my sleeping done at night and I have to be awake for a while. After a while the sun will come up. I keep hoping all this snow will melt off. It hasn't so far. If it doesn't it will just get deeper and deeper and settle in on itself, form itself into a glacier and start moving south. We are living in an interglacial as the scientists call it, and none of us expect to live to see the day when the next ice age starts on its merry way south, sweeping Chicago and New York aside.
The primates at the zoo are by far the most interesting animals. I could watch them for hours, There they sit or lie staring at you so strangely, so persistently and with so much melancholy. Or they sit on an artificial tree branch with their hairy hand like feet grasping and scratching, eating their own droppings or maybe those of a friend. The bonobos are higher strung and scream and lope around sometimes. Otherwise just chilling. A gorilla calmly eats a cardboard box, or some leaves. Youngsters wrestle one another as kids will do. They look bored. They don't give the humans a thought, turn their back to them. They clearly annoy them. What am I doing here?
What would a human exhibit look like at the zoo? Here is Homo sapiens doing his thing. There could be an apartment with a plexiglas wall on one side. A TV set over in the corner, maybe a charcoal grill. A bookshelf (in my case). A computer and a refrigerator. All the kids would have hand held devices and be completely wrapped up in them. Everyone would look bored and would have their backs turned to the crowd looking at them from the other side of the glass.
I am this guy and I'm at my keyboard right now. Just thought I'd tell you a little bit about me. I was born towards the middle of the last century in a hospital in America. The doctor I am told suctioned me out so I could breathe, something I have done ever since, and I began to cry, which was quite age appropriate. I had a mother who was right there at the time, and my Dad was there too, helping out. This is what my parents told me, but I don't have any recollection of those events. I guess some things are so horrible you just block them out. It was summer when I was born and we lived in a small town of cinder blocks. Kind of a bleak place actually, but we had a TV set and a record player, and green painted cinder block walls. There were these people across the street. The father drove a bread truck and something bad had happened to them during a war. But they were okay now. The mom was a little high strung, and so was their little boy I used to play with. He liked to urinate outdoors. He was the only kid on my block that was my age so he was my friend. Other kids were a few years older so didn't want to have much to do with me. It was kind of lonely of course.
Anyway we lived on one side of a cul de sac in a neighborhood near a large city. We used to find mulberries growing in a ditch next to the neighboring cul de sac through which a creek ran. We ate them till our teeth were all purple, except for the ones the birds had shit all over. I had an older brother who was constantly tormenting me and a sister nearer my own age, and an older sister who was enormous. She was as big as my mom. I had a very regulated young life. If my mom wasn't watching me, big sister was. And of course there was nothing I could do against her, she was as I said, enormous. It wasn't fair.
I watched TV a lot as a kid. I remember some TV sets just had huge cabinets and tiny little screens without any color. Then throughout my life the screens have gotten bigger and the cabinets got smaller. It was a historical trend. Kind of like telephones, which used to be black with number wheels on them. When they rang it was a really loud ringing noise. You couldn't sleep through that. And you could only get them in black, because that was what the phone company would give you. All these women would call my Dad at all times of the day or night and my Dad would go off in his car and do stuff for them. Mom knew all about it but didn't seem to mind.
At the age of 5 I went to school or kindergarten. I had a teacher who was also enormous. She kept us entertained during the day and then we got out our little mats and we had to lie on the floor and be quiet for half an hour or so, while I stared at the ceiling wondering about the asbestos tile up there. She read to us about Indians, but I didn't care for Indians. They bored me, for some reason. I found myself bored in school a lot. And why were they making me do all this with other kids I really didn't like? Was this what I could expect in life? Be a good little bored little boy, and sit there like a stone, please.
Anyway we moved to another town in another state where they didn't have kindergarten so I stayed home all day in my underpants watching TV. Mostly it seemed people had these problems until someone pulled a gun on someone else and the bad guy would be killed. They were cowboys and Indians. The Indians were always trying to put a tomahawk into somebody and rode around in circles whooping it up. When you said hi to an Indian he said "How:" He wasn't asking a question apparently. It was just something they did. When people died on TV it was I thought a sacrifice of someone's life to tell a story. Actors would go to studios saying that they wanted to be shot. And they shot them and died. Must have been a huge cemetery outside the studio.
And then there was this older dude with a moustache who would tell us how things were. He seemed to be in charge of it all. I guess someone had to be in charge. And he would end up saying "And that's the way it is." But then you switch channels and after a bufferin ad showing what your innards looked like when there was pain going on, then you saw two other guys who would also tell you what was happening. They would just say to each other "Good Night, David" "Good Night Chet" and all was okay in the world, sort of because something was always happening and more people were being shot. For a while I thought the guy with the moustache was in control of things, and what he said went, not only in the US but in the world.
I went to school. I used to walk there every day. It was only a few blocks. I learned to read. Some of the kids were amazingly stupid, and these kids ended up being special. I wasn't special, which was fortunate for me, since my educational future was more likely. The girl I shared a desk in first grade just stared at me but never said a word to me. We went out to "recess" and the special kids would be sitting over in the corner throwing bits of gravel at other kids while a river of snot flowed the short distance from nose to mouth. The windows facing the playground had a wire mesh grill that prevented balls from shattering the windows.
I did okay in grade school but apparently I wasn't exceptional. We sat in the classroom staring out the window idly while the teacher droned on. Every hour or two there would be a sonic boom that would wake some of us up and rattle the windows pretty smartly. Any more I don't hear sonic booms.
