Another Rumination on the Ice Age Mind

please let me point out that I am NOT thinking about sandy beaches,

and that, though we all agree that tulips in springtime are impressive,

their travels from Asia and subsequent incitement of economic turmoil,

I am not here to talk about those things today.

What I am most certainly interested in talking about, now that I have your attention,

is the low hum of electricity, a sort of screaming low amplitude buzz that pervades artificial

places like this, and leads to constant filtering and unfiltering. Even now, I can hear a siren

in the distance, a plea for the passerby to get out of the way when a day has been ruined by adversity, or by just plain laziness about getting to the hospital, or by too many Michelobs and a pool cue, savage a species that we may be, we still plea for the emergency vehicles to get to their destination and their cargo to be only mildly inconvenienced.

I wonder how things would be if we lived in caves and had to listen for predators. Surely there was more silence back then. Surely, people in the last interglacial before this one did not talk for the sake of talking, did they? Did mammoths bleat in the distance? Was the footstep of a mouse as significant as an email? I have certainly spent years of my young life sharpening sticks and trying to recreate this savage experience, foraging vast grasslands in my mind, and trying to reconstruct the serpentine glow of them on trips down to El Camino Real.

The truth of the matter is that we are never tame inside, probably not one of us, we possess all those savage instincts so strongly that, though our computers and refrigerators buzz and pollute our analysis of the timbre of the dog barking nearby, bored and desperate, perhaps hungry too, we never forget our ice age instincts. Do we?