Tag Archives: gorilla

Dated

Dated: (adj) out-of-date; old-fashioned

Oily tongues and greasy lips.

This would be my description of the verbiage that comes off the mouths of those settlers who presently have found their place on the prairie of Earthscape.

Everyone thinks they are so smart.

Everyone believes they’ve invented the wheel—but they don’t want to call it the wheel. That’s too dated.

So instead they call it the “circlebon.”

And they smirk, as if cleverness has found a permanent home in their hearts.

I just hate it when a song is played and it’s beautiful, powerful, emotional—and people sit around and discuss how the production is so “dated” that it’s difficult to listen to.

Or they’ll watch a movie and call it dated. Yes—it is dated. It was produced on a particular date.  Traveling into the future to produce it later was impossible.

They took what they had, what they knew, what they felt, what they believed, and they put it on a screen. So without you commenting on the camera work or the lighting, or whether the credits were done in your favorite font, could you simply just bring your soul and let it ease down into the warm waters of the experience?

No?

I understand.

Just please take your oily tongue and your greasy lips elsewhere.

I don’t care if something is dated.

I want to know if it can touch me, if I can feel something real and if it inspires me to find the better parts of my humanity—instead of becoming a gorilla with a weekend pass to the suburbs.

Cro-Magnon Man

Cro-Magnon Man: (n) an early type of modern man

There is an abiding thought that steers my thinking:

“If I end up being wrong, how can I survive it well?”

Because basically, my life thus far has told me that I’m going to be wrong—partially because I’m a little pig-headed, but also because on occasion, I follow the instincts of others who are likewise oinkers.

I remember one weekend sitting in a seminar in which the pros and cons of evolution were discussed. I immediately felt that the topic was a bit high minded, with low results. But I listened anyway.

It quickly boiled down to a single issue:

Those of a more religious inclination were very upset about man evolving from the animal kingdom.

And those who were less concerned about ecclesiastical matters didn’t seem to care much.

Now, here’s a fact:

None of them knew what the hell they were talking about.

We usually don’t.

Probably long, long ago, when there were Cro-Magnon people walking the Earth, they would have been equally upset to think they evolved from apes, even though the similarity was close enough that a gorilla would occasionally hit on one of the women.

Very early on, we decided what’s ugly, what’s stupid and what’s spiritual.

Yet I never heard a frog object to evolving from a fish, nor a two-cell organism insisting it was impossible to have once been singular.

It’s a fear in our race—that if we are not superior, then it’s just not fair and needs to be changed immediately.

I can tell you the truth—I don’t care.

I personally look nothing like a Cro-Magnon Man.

They were hairy, dark brown and stooped.

I, on the other hand, appear to have evolved from a marshmallow.

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Cave

Cave: (n) a large underground chamber in a hillside or cliff.

Cave men.

We just accept that these individuals existed. Basically, they’re described as a step up from a gorilla, and a few steps down from a sophomore in high school.

Here’s the problem–at least, the situation for me. The fact that the human race lived in caves seems intelligent. The enclosure would be
completely safe from the outside elements and would not require to be rebuilt every time a storm came along to blow it down.

And also, inside these caves are drawings. Therefore these cave men, which are supposedly not much more intelligent than apes, found pieces of charcoal and were able, from their brains, to replicate things they had seen and sketch them on a rock wall.

I feel very confident that I am more intelligent than a monkey–but if you put me in a cave, I don’t know if I could find the charcoal to draw with, or come up with a picture that anyone would recognize.

So what were cave men?

Were they people without the resources to build huts, produce weapons and tools, who just chose to climb into caves to protect themselves?

Or was this just a phase in a mental evolution the human race went through, to get to where we are now?

For after all, how much progress have we made away from the man cave?

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Brutal

j-r-practix-with-border-2

Brutal: (adj.) savagely violent.

On occasion, I comically refer to human beings as “monkey angels.”

A little bit of jungle, a little bit of heaven.

Because of this mixed breeding, the climate for our species requires a careful mingling of tough and tender.

I get in discussions with my sons about this all the time. They are convinced they can watch Dictionary Bmurder and mayhem in the movies and experience brutal treatment of God’s children, and be no worse the wear.

But the true diet for our spirit is an enduring toughness about complications and a tender empathy for our fellow-travelers.

In other words, celebrating, commemorating and being challenged by those who overcome difficulty through their determination, while emotionally impacted by gentleness among all brothers and sisters.

We’ve flipped it.

I think we try to be tough with our dealings with each other as we tenderize ourselves with decapitation, devastation and depravity.

It screws us up.

So I, for one, have no desire to become stronger by watching brutal acts.

Brutal is for brutes.

And “brute” is the part of our monkey that wants to act like a gorilla.

 

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Ape

dictionary with letter A

Ape (n.) 1. an animal like a monkey but without a tail, such as a chimpanzee or gorilla. (v) 2. to imitate.

It’s confusing to me.

People who advocate for Darwinian evolution also are the greatest proponents for higher education. Yet they certainly are not trying to get the chimpanzee to evolve to Harvard.

On the other hand, those who insist that God created man from the dust of the earth, and that we have no missing link to the ape, often discourage scientific discovery and brain teasing.

How bizarre.

I guess I’m one of those weird people who find evolution completely possible until you reach the point of leaping from the chimpanzee to the human being, so I contend there was a God who created the process, but yearns for the Homo sapiens wing of creation to pursue science, nature and knowledge to the utmost.

Call me obtuse and surely you must.

It appears to me that people use evolution to promote their atheism and creationism to attack the infidel.

No one actually sits down and thinks about how this all might have come to be, but instead, looks for a position to perch from which to throw stones.

I love nature. I just believe it was created. And I am sure that there was evolution involved, and even find that the Good Book strongly suggests that the “survival of the fittest” is not only practical, but spiritual.

I have no confidence whatsoever that a gorilla or an ape of any sort would find kinship with me simply because neither of us sport a tail.

 

 

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Anti-racism

dictionary with letter AAnti-racism: (n) the policy of opposing racism and promoting racial tolerance.

It is cruel, insane and useless to walk up to a man having a heart attack, lying on a gurney and proffer, “You shouldn’t have eaten so much bacon.”

Warnings have to come at the right time, or they are either petty bitchiness or meaningless babble.

Anti-racism is similar to this. We all grew up in households where preferences were promoted. So it is ridiculous to think that we’re going to ease our way into a world where color doesn’t matter.

We must stop arresting the neighbors who live next door to the Bodega that was vandalized and start looking for the actual perpetrators.

What causes racism?

1. Too much emphasis on culture.

Matter of fact, I’m not comfortable with any emphasis on culture. When I begin to believe that the Chinese, the Africans, the Jews, the Arabs and the Europeans have different ways of looking at life, I am setting myself up to feel arrogant over my rendition.

2. Take away the stigma of loving who you want to love.

Even though we are willing to accept that the chimpanzee or ape is our ancestor, we are not able to procreate with one. Yet there is no human being of any color or ethnic origin who cannot pair off and make a baby. What a piece of hypocrisy.

Many people would be more willing to accept a gorilla as a neighbor than they are an Hispanic.

3. Be clean.

Start off on the basis that all of us were taught a certain amount of prejudice, which can explode into full-fledged bigotry.

The misconception in America is the belief that we have racism under control because we elected a black President.

First of all, President Obama may not be any more black than I am, since he had a white mother.

Secondly, what we choose to do publicly does not determine our soul. It is the truth that lies on our inward parts–our private notions–which carry the heart of our true beliefs.

When we realize that racism is just another piece of our immature nature which needs to be addressed and abandoned, we will actually go forward.

As the great writer once said, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, but now that I’ve become a man, I have put away childish things.”

 

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