Note:
This is a post on July 20, 2014 from my friend Justin Clay's facebook page Good Morning Creatures. For more such posts, read Justin Clay's entries on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Goodmorningcreatures
Good morning creatures,
I often find that suddenly, after a week or two of just filling my head with nonsense, I suddenly have the compulsion to say things again.
About half if the week, usually, I don't really want to speak. I just want to observe, or inundate myself with ideas/stories/circumstances and I don't want to comment on it, I just want to take it all in... I don't want to talk yet, but then, like the ding of a microwave I suddenly have this strange urge to open my face hole and try and make noise, noise that I hope will articulate the frothy goolash of chemicals I have produced by force feeding my mind.
It's quite remarkable that we can speak, I mean, it's quite a miracle. Instead of gestures and eye contact, which our chimpanzee cousins still use, we can avoid potentially hostile social interactions by making a series of noises. Amazing really.
And on another level, THIS...this little series of symbols, little lines and squiggles, that are all very similar, can be used to essentially take a snapshot of the noise we make and preserve it, and then deliver it to eachother in a portable format. Astounding!
So... On that note,
It's amazing how little we talk to eachother. Could we be afraid? I mean, this morning I encountered a brand new human being who was working the counter behind the gas station, a buckys... Eeesh... Of all places... And this was a middle aged lady with tired eyes, she avoided eye contact with me and when I walked up and said hello, she did not respond to my greeting. If i was a chimpanzee this would have already set off some red flags. The first thing a chimp does when meeting a new chimp is thrust it's face close to the other chimp and make direct eye contact... That's assuming they are already not shrieking at eachother simply because they are strangers, but lets just say there was no overt hostility when they approached eachother, so naturally, the first thing they do to kind of establish a sense of ease is make direct and unmistakeable eye contact. If this is not done, there will be trouble. They might part ways making slightly uneasy gestures and noise. But lets just say, even minus the eye contact, the chimp makes a gesture of friendly greeting, a little pant hoot, and reaches out limply and touches the other chimp. If the chimp does not respond and still makes no eye contact, there is a chance the chimp that initiated the greeting will be set off. It might now perceive this unresponsive stranger as a threat, and will flee or might even try and run off the unresponsive chimp aggressively.
But this is not what happend with me and the gas station lady this morning, I did not start shrieking and run out of the store in fear, looking back every few steps and howling, trying to make sure she wasn't following me, no
All I said was , " can I get 20 on number 6"
Then, still with not even the slightest eye contact, we proceeded with a little ritual with my plastic card ( which is just to strange to get into now) and without a word from her, and prompted by the little robot card reader, I left, I managed to say, " thanks, have a good one" without even checking if she responded, which she probably didn't. She was actually preoccupied with her little robot phone.
This could have gone so many different ways, had I uttered different noises. I find this pretty interesting. I could have said, " excuse me, can you tell me how far it is to heaven, oh and I need 20 on number 6" and man! What a different response I would have likely gotten.
But alas, I acted like a robot, an extension of my car, an extension of my job, an extension of my society... An uninterested, soulless machine, a brainless transaction, a function. And we go our separate ways.
But it's ok, because I will certainly have the chance to greet hundreds of other noisy apes today. Plenty of strangers to test my flight or fight responses on.
Could this voluntary lack of connection be some residual primeval fear left over from the brutal days of our ancestors when death was a possibility when meeting a stranger, or is it a conditioned, learned behavior,
I can tell you this, my little son has no problem staring at people and telling them what's on his mind, nor do many old folks I've met.
So, my sacred primate companions, who are capable of making fascinating noise, where are you? And how come we aren't communicating with eachother?
Is it fear, is is laziness? Is it simply that we feel we don't have the time, are we distracted?
I think that we should all assume, it's not that dangerous to communicate, I mean, we manage to runn around most days without getting killed, but at what price? And do we really need to be robots to accomplish this? Cause really, we still do fight, so there's no reason to try and cower behind the distractions of this culture,
I think we should all try and tell eachother a story.
My son just learned how to say " I love you" with confidence recently, and he says it a lot now
So consider this a stare in the face
I'm looking at you
For more such posts, read Justin Clay's entries on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Goodmorningcreatures
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