New monitor lizard discovered in Indonesia

New monitor lizard discovered in Indonesia

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?

it is probably worth mentioning that there is a fifteen month old sleeping just two or three meters away, who is desperately unable to use words to communicate what must be the ambitions of a poet, a madwoman, or a superhero. i write this because it is amazingly obvious to me now that we all develop these incredibly vast mental worlds as younglings, vast mental universes grown so quickly, as if analogous to the cosmic inflation after the big bang, that a person could spend fifteen minutes trying to climb into a chair, and then radiantly satisfied with success at such an endeavor, slip out of the chair to do exactly the same thing. the fact of the matter is that chairs are worth climbing, and we forget this as we age because we spend more and more of our time thinking about food, sex, and status, as good mammals do, to procreate our genes.

i should indicate here that there is a very sad lack of other inhabited planets in the solar system with which to listen to cosmic perspectives on matters such as this, but, in general, clouds of condensing water vapor are beautiful, as are the colors of oxidized ore, and the iridescences of insect exoskeletons and bird feathers. if a creator existed, he or she would needs have such an incredible fixation with asteroid impacts, helium, and vast empty voids between things. i know that such a being cannot conceivably exist, in any state resembling a human intelligence, because of simple everyday observations like magnetars and seaweed.

Just one small note here.

Dear Reader,

This is of no consequence, none of it, there is no such thing as an albatross and anyway, I am sick of flying. Too many mosquitoes have come to nest here, and clean the nest they have, creating lawn decorations with their bodies and efforts. Whoever thinks they can pronounce the name of an omnipotent creator in polysyllables has disappointment in their future, because the human vocal apparatus is severely limited at the high frequencies, and yet man was supposedly made in his image. That is to say that the omnipotent creator is imagined to be a man which means he has a penis of some kind which cannot possibly inseminate anything, or if it can the immaculate conception had graphic scenes left on the cutting room floor, but this event in and of itself makes him flawed and with human frailties, like Zeus, for all his power had the sexual judgment of a thirteen year old and Yaweh seems to have a similar bent for young virgins and this is proof of a lack of omnipotence and now one wonders how such an entity can have created the cosmos, and god gets smaller and smaller till we barely tolerate him under the radiator and start to vacuum.

Did I mention robots? Because if I did not I should at least mention that the ones they make now are lame, but except the great big arms that live in power plants, feasting on electricity and putting auto workers out of jobs. Those are cool.

archaeology

i should stop doing this. the excavating of the past. i went on a dig recently, and failed to find the nine year old boy with the spear made out of a sharpened stick. he erased himself, as versions of my past tend to. i found myself wishing that he had left a written record, but like so many great civilizations, what written records that did survive said little about the populace and more about obscurities. the landscape has undergone such a complete metamorphosis it is as if some Stalinist set out to remove all trace of the interiors, the immediate surroundings, but the lay of things was intact, more or less. i found myself coveting the years ahead of them that the young people in the city had, and their present circumstances, carrying laundry up those great hills. i have been doing altogether too much of that lately, but i think this last dig had me cured of the habit. a person can only live one lifetime, and unlike Vonnegut's Trafamadorians, we cannot even slide back and fourth along this thread of spacetime and must somehow make sense of its incompleteness, its inability to breach the other possible timelines that could have been and see the whole picture of things. perhaps this picture, if not viewed with the proper eye protection, would disintegrate a mind into nothing but proteins. i suppose, with a little help from Dr. Pangloss, i am safe here, on this thread, a life among them.

Recent Art

you have seen three of four of these before, but i like them as still pieces more, perhaps, so here they are again.

Annihilator Neurasthenasism