The biological imperative

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.