sunflowes

sunflower seeds, you are planted, beside your already-thriving cousins, the volunteers. magnolia vine, thank you for flowering after all these years, a deep need for the sexuality of pollinators finally coming to the surface now that the squash vine is gone for good. my own life is a balance like yours, between the comfort of somatic cell growth and the fight with senescence, and mammalian parental care, and defending a nest site from the elements, and foraging. it is deep in the mammalian genetic programming to follow the younglings like slaves, our seed do not disperse in fruit or allow themselves to be carried away by mice and ants so easily.

it crashes and crashes and crashes against the shore of my mind, all that conflict and woe, hope and helplessess i create by arranging this game every six months. i offer food pellets for remembering the significance of an experiment, a genus and species, a genotype. too few food pellets and my gamesters starve, food enough and they go on to other games with other pellets, but mostly they keep inventories of their various pellets as if their lives depended upon it. it is my fault, i suppose, for having failed to find a way to impress upon them the grandeur of a Cambrian lobopod or the tangled connection of ancient ancestors within their brains. at least, this applies to most of them. there are always a few that trickle through, like incandescent dinoflagellates in a current of ideas older and greater than us all. where these will end up, i have no idea, but they are part of a process that assembles and reassembles elements of what really matters in us, through the centuries, like our genes through the millions of years since cambrian lobopods

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.