An Old Beringian Dude Speaks

Hey kids, listen up, yo.  I'm not some old dude sitting in a dark cave, talking about the old days.  I'm hip to all the stone tools you are using nowadays.  Hafted Clovis points-I've been using them for years.  I can flintknap with all the new technologies.  Check out this bone fish hook.  Of course, back in the day, my generation walked across the land bridge from Asia with noting but skins on our backs and a spear.  That was old school. If you wanted to eat that night, you had to stare an imperial mammoth in the eyes and throw a spear between his ribs.  Kids nowadays.  What have you accomplished, in this land of abundant game?  Surely, nobody can take down a mammoth properly anymore.  You kids are ok though, with your mastery of fire and your petroglyphs.  I guess, you are the future, aren't you?

Sisyphus

From the outside, up there in the sunlight, on those rolling hills you call home, it is easy to come to the conclusion that I am not happy in this new life of mine-pushing a boulder up a gigantic hill, only to watch it roll down the other side.  I suppose, for the first two thousand years, that was the case.  I have learned to live with it.  Perhaps my greatest victory in this immortal existence of mine is that I never let the gods punish me properly.  Over the eons, I have learned how to be happy despite the crushing weight of a boulder pounding against my hands.  There is that beautiful moment, at the top of the hill, when I can see all of Tarterus.  Hellfire all around me.  Prometheus on his rock, vultures circling.  Atlas with a burden of his own.  I release the boulder, and instead of hoping that for this one time in two million iterations, it would stay put at the top of this terrible summit, I relish the first slow second of unbalance and acceleration as gravity takes hold and it starts to roll downhill.  I never rush the walk to retrieve it.  Never ever.  It is a lazy jaunt, with a sidelong look to reflect on sleeping Cerebrus.  There is always another push uphill, but then again, there is always another walk downhill also.

A lament

Its tough being socially inept and deformed.  I wish everyone just assumed I had rabies, or that I was dropped on my head as a child, repeatedly.  The truth is, some deformities are cooler than others.  I would choose acromegaly over proteus syndrome any day.  If I had Angelman syndrome, I would be at a loss for choosing among options, but I would laugh a lot.  I suppose, if I were a dwarf I would have it made.  Or, would I?  It would be lonely, living without my conjoined twin, my sirenomelia, my secret mystery fistula.  Time to ponder over a bucket of chicken heads.

Why I Do Not Understand Twentieth Century Politics

"I'm feeling kinda Hitlerey".  A diaper clad Baby Huey delivers the line, onstage, to a cheering Nuremberg.  The salutes start.  Seig Heil!, the spectators shout in unison as the scene fades to black and white.  Two mortified parents look on as their offspring, never the funniest of the Saturday Morning Cartoons, or truth be told, never among the B list, screams in German.  He has found his apotheosis.  Silence. The crowds disappear.  "I'm feeling kind of Hitlery" he pouts.  Bombs explode above his cold bunker.  He puts the pistol in his mouth.

A Note from the Anthropocene

There is no end to it, not even our own extinction.  That will be a mere beginning.  Its effects will promulgate like rumors.  Is is it too much to ask for a comfortable chair?  Ten thousand years in progress already, and I walked in late and missed the wooly rhinos.  Still, I may have contributed to the plastic in the oceans.  I have seen the shopping bags thick around Chicago trees in wintertime.  A South American with an uncertain political pedigree mistook them for lichens.  This is one of the good parts, I suppose.  I remember seas of wild frogs, streaming through the grass in front of me.  rhinos, tigers, and other key megafauna on their way out, but the taste of Ahi tuna is not even an ancient memory and I have seen wild caught salmon with my own eyes. Already, the foraminifera are plotting their next comeback.  The disaster taxa stare us in the face, masked like raccoons, swarming like houseflies, abundant as Argentine ants, prolific as ragweed, durable as jellies and, like tree of heaven and the Burmese python, many of them impressive creatures in their own right.  What fossils will I leave?  I may possibly hold isotopes, in my body, from nuclear testing.  The trail of evidence depends so strongly on what big-brained beast of the future, descendent of this holocaust, is looking.  I have wondered so many times if some hypercompetent echinoderm from the Ordovician or industrious trepanosaur from the Permian is to blame for the troubles of our age. The paleontologists of the future will not hold it against us, for the simple reason that vast spans of time will have passed and their own evolutionary course would be impossible were it not for our mistakes, our ambitions, our glory and foolishness.  I have come to terms with that Cretaceous asteroid, though it took me longer than most of my kind.