Something To Chew On

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"

-Rush, Freewill

We all like to think that we're different, that we're smarter than the average person in whatever demographic we may inhabit, that we're going to make it, that our own individual experience is somehow unique - you act like you're the first person to fall in love, the first person to give birth, the first person to have terminal cancer, the first person to think your car is a spaceship, the first person to be blown away that one time you discovered Rush - we believe we're going to beat the system, we believe we're the universe owes it to us to dispense equal and fair justice that's just a little biased towards ourselves because we all know that we're at its center, we think that history is just one big setup that culminates in Right Now, that it has all lead up to this point, that our dreams mean something, that our actions mean something, that we are more important than just the atoms we're made of and the space they take up, that we are independent, rational, free-thinking, logical children of the enlightenment, endowed with the gift of sapience to solve the Rubik's Cube that is the universe, when really, we might have to come to terms with the fact that we're just being influenced by quantum mechanics and instincts we don't understand.

Movies, Not Films

I watch movies, not films. Perhaps they would have you think that movies are fun and meaningless and something to move product and popcorn, and on the other side of the dichotomy, films mean something and are for mature, intelligent people with attention spans. Movies are flashy, appeal to people who like shiny things and bright things and fast things and follow the crowd; films make you think and don't rely on special effects, and are oftentimes made in some strange foreign language that requires you to read. Movies are made by big studios that are little more than factories, and films are made by intelligent people with Buddy Holly glasses and bad haircuts. Movies are low culture, films are high culture.

But really, a "seeing a film" is just a pretentious way of saying you saw a movie. And even when you think you're watching a film, no matter how much the truth galls you, you're really just watching a plain old movie. That's why I will never watch a film. I like watching movies too much.

My Confused Inner Caveman

I know that it's not actually based on science, but I sometimes think that my caveman body, that is, my primitive, pre-civilization body has a mind of its own and is trying to interpret the world in which it lives, and explain it in terms that it knows.  And I imagine it must be very confused, because it has to deal with all sorts of unnatural things, like routinely traveling at 60+ miles an hour, high fructose corn syrup, and whatever the hell they put in NyQuil.

I tend to make one meal with a lot of leftovers, and subsist off it for at least two days.  This makes sense to my inner caveman, because he expects that the only thing in the fridge is what he killed a few days ago.  But more often than not, it's probably more confusing, because he's thinking "what, I run all day and all I catch is spaghetti?  Where's the mastodon?"

That's probably also why I always need to be munching on something when I'm sitting down.  He's saying "hey man, what are we doing just sitting here, we could be foraging for berries or something."  Half of that translates to action; I munch on a bag of chips or something and keep sitting there, and as long as he's getting fed he's happy, because for all he knows, it's still the ice age and the next meal could be a long ways away.

When I go to Costco to stalk up on non-mastodon foodstuffs, I'm able to get almost a full meal out of free samples.  This makes sense to him, because it's like foraging.  A bunch of small amounts of random foodstuffs are coming his way, but he has to wait for it, and seek it out.

He's probably wondering why I haven't had my head smashed in at least once by a heavy blunt object, and why my feet never really seem to hit the ground, almost as if something is strapped onto my feet.  He wonders what this kind of cave it is I live in - it seems too bright and never the temperature that would be expected.  When I watch TV, he wonders why this strange kind of fire entertains me so much.  Why so many hot liquids going down your throat? he thinks, why so many chemicals in the air you breathe?  And when I eat a banana, he thinks "I didn't come all the way down from the trees just to eat like a damn monkey!"  (This also happens when I eat insects from off my friends' backs.)

And I'm sure that for most people, their inner caveman is even more confused.  They're sedentary, for the most part, and they stay up all night and are half-asleep while the sun is up.  And their biggest adrenaline rushes seem to come when they're sitting down, seemingly doing nothing fight or flight-y at all.  We've lost touch with part of what we are.  We've gained a lot, but I can't help wonder if it all just serves to make our bodies confused.

In reality, there is no thought behind any of our biological processes.  But it's amusing enough to think otherwise, if only to realize how different we have become, and how far we are removed, from what we as humanity did not so long ago.