too much thinking going on in my head. it’s been a long day. every year it’s the same. winters are cold and long and while at first you don’t mind, by the end you’re praying for the sun. and then a hot day like this comes along and all i can think is oh yeah, i hate the summer. it’s humid enough to melt cotton candy. going on our little trip tomorrow. we went food shopping today. i wish cars weren’t so useful. it almost makes me want one. but without a driveway, you have to play musical cars. only when you’re left without a spot, instead of being “out”, you get a ticket. tv commercials make me feel like my brain has been put in a food processor. unending chatter pureeing my thoughts into a flat alpha. our automatic kitty litter cleaner is humming away. how long before i have a garbage bot? eats garbage, compresses it in its stomach, walks itself to the curb, delivers its contents to the sanitation worker or dumps it into the truck, comes back to my kitchen. fuck the roomba, that’s the better mousetrap.
quin took a header off the couch tonight. i had just gotten comfortable when i look across the room and see him fall. he was sound asleep at the time, so i think he was more stunned than anything else. he cried a bit and then passed out again like nothing happened. i liken it to drunk drivers who survive accidents because they’re so drunk that they don’t resist the accident. i mean, if there’s anything in nature that is like a drunk adult, it’s a tired baby.
is civilization learned? i believe that we have some innate social instinct. And yes, I mean instinct just like when we say a skunk’s spray is instinct or how plants instinctually grow towards the sun. But the brain is a very good turing machine, right? I think it’s a few orders more complex than our current digital analogues, but it’s the best analogy we have at the moment. but could this “incredible machine” adapt to surroundings to such a degree as to _learn_ “from scratch” all the things we do? i mean, if it’s true that we have brain centers specifically handling language, we presuppose an environment in which we can communicate with others of our kind. The body is built to be social. i somehow feel that the dichotomy of nature and nurture isn’t a useful definition of reality. without nature, we would be ill adapted to survive in a dynamic environment. but without nurture, experience, the programming done by dna would be useless.
here’s what i want to know… if you believe in evolution (please god, say you believe in evolution), then you know that man evolved to this state in an environment we call “nature”. but why is it that there is “man made” and “natural”? man comes from nature but views his own works as something that stands outside nature.
oh well, i need my beauty sleep.
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