Aristotle

Aristotle’s intellectual brilliance has shown for over two thousand years. Even so, perhaps his wisest statement can be paraphrased thusly:

“All I know is that I know nothing.”

Where does that put you and me?

I guess we can say we know a little bit more than he did. Surely Wikipedia contains enough information so that anyone with broadband knows a little bit about something.

What occurs to me is thank God someone is writing this stuff down.

Each successive generation of humanity stands on shoulders of the last. But it isn’t making us any smarter. We just have the answers to the tests now.

It’s possible that the evolution of the species as a whole will be the eventual source of our deliverance from catastrophic global failure, but this evolution certainly isn’t happening on an individual level.

I’m afraid more likely is that the petty nature of the individual will prevent any meaningful change. The selfishness that above all guides us, hard-wired into our DNA since we were little four-legged mammals and necessary for individual survival, will be our collective undoing.

They say that if you put two lobsters in a bucket of water neither will escape. Whenever one of them makes a break for freedom he will be pulled back by his jealous peer.

Are we enlightened men or simple lobsters? I think the answer lies somewhere in between.

The Sport of People Watching

Without a doubt, people watching is my favorite activity. I pretend to be into other activities as a ruse, a cover up for my real goal—to check out the mish mash of freaks, nerds, squares, fatties, thinnies, mullet wearing and inappropriate skin bearing redneck couples, unruly kids and their oblivious parents, foreigners, potential terrorists, and, of course, the mentally retarded (sorry, I know it’s wrong).

I will tag along to ANY event to engage in my sport. Ask me to a NASCAR event, the zoo (the real show is outside the cages), a Las Vegas casino, or better yet a rural Indian casino. I will go gladly. I would go to a cat fashion show in Rancho Cucamonga—please don’t call me out on that one.

The twisted thing about people watching is that we don’t do it out of admiration, or a love of witnessing the human condition. We do it to mock the unfortunate, the ugly, and the fashion-less. Well at least that’s why I do it; perhaps you have a purer heart.

Even if you’re in Newport Beach, watching a steady stream of tanned and toned cougars and MILFs stepping in and out of Range Rovers and Mercedes convertibles, you are thinking to yourself how lost these poor people are. You, the watcher, never got caught up in their materialistic living nightmare, and so on.

It only recently occurred to me that I might be a part of the freak show. That, perhaps as I sat above the fray, on my high chair, heaping scorn on all that passed, I was being ridiculed myself. I mean, I have bad hair days. Soon I will have no hair days.

And so it goes, from the lowliest bum to the highest CEO, we are all pointing at the other guy.

Look at what an idiot he is.

And that’s what makes people watching such a great sport—its one we can all play.

So if I see you on the street, know that I am inwardly mocking you. And if I catch you looking at me...go ahead and say something, tough guy.

Rats

I had trouble digesting my dinner tonight. A little bit of gastronomical mayhem put me out of whack chewing on nothing more than a salad. Turns out nothing throws an otherwise healthy stomach out of balance quite like stomping a fellow mammal to death with a baseball bat.

I had to do it. It was him or me.

I had a few advantages—he was stuck in glue and I was light on my feet. I also outweighed him quite a bit. But he was desperate. He had nothing to lose, and that’s the last kind of fight you want to get involved in.

My foe was a rat. Not a big one…tangled with bigger in my time. But I never got used to it. They’re nasty little fuckers.

I once lived in a house that rats thought they took over. We weren’t running the place properly. The rats were more efficient.

When a rat feels at home, you have failed as a homeowner. Towards the end, I could no longer look the rats in the eye. I would pass hesitantly through their strongholds, looking down, hoping not to get in their way.

They knew how we lived. Our filth and apathy was their Shangri-La. And they thrived.

They took to sauntering along the living room walls in the pale afternoon shadows. One of their top warriors—some sort of battle trained Spartan-like beast—jumped my roommate from inside a bag of chips on the kitchen counter. Another one survived a direct hit from a Hawaiian Sling, a three pronged spearfishing weapon. It was pinned for a full five seconds through the snout into the kitchen linoleum. When my friend pulled the spear out, the critter ran without hesitation to his money spot behind the oven.

Merely a flesh wound, human.

Eventually human ingenuity won that battle. Thank god these menaces have been keeping humans awake for centuries, and smarter men than I have figured them out. Their efficient eradication has come to symbolize ingenuity itself.





The first mousetrap was built in 1897 by James Henry Atkinson, a Brit with an understanding of springs, and, evidently, a sloppy lifestyle like my own. And since he made that fateful choice to retreat to his workshop rather than clean up after himself, mankind has been working on making his invention better.


Ever since Ralph Waldo Emerson famously announced: "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door", killing mice has positioned itself right below curing cancer on the ladder of human achievement.

So here I was tonight, standing over a young rat stuck in glue. I’m not sure when the glue trap was invented—I am sure that the human version was banned at the Geneva Convention, perhaps even earlier.

From two rooms away, I heard him yelp when he realized his situation. You can’t ignore a rat in a glue trap. At best you listen to him moan for a few hours, at worst he chews off his stuck leg and comes seeking revenge. So I grabbed a wooden Louisville slugger—not a toy, the real thing, more club than stick.

Standing as far away as I could, I whacked him about five times, his squeaks growing weaker with each hit, like he was running out of batteries.

You learn about yourself in times like these. I learned that I am no killer. I have no problem stomping a roach or gutting a fish I just pulled out of the ocean, but there is something different about snuffing out a fellow mammal. Their warm hearts beat like little versions of our own. It’s like beating a hairy little cousin to death. But like I said, it was him or me, or rather them or us. I knew how easily the rats can win.

So I did the deed until it was done. And then I placed him outside, still stuck in the glue, as a warning to his buddies, a gory testament to what awaits intruders.

So now I am sitting here pushing salad around a plate, trace amounts of adrenaline still shaking my hands, knowing that there will be more blood to shed. Like the Indian who successfully defends his turf from the first white man on the block, I know the battle is not won and perhaps will never be. There is little satisfaction in that kind of scalp.

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Next Day Update:

So I go to check on him this morning and find one of his buddies stuck right next to him. This guy had been there all night but he was still writhing slowly, his leg looking a little mangled, like he had done some half hearted chewing for freedom.

But that wasn’t the real shock. The kicker was that the first guy was gutted, his tasty entrails either in the stomach of his friend lying next to him or another of their tribe. This was the type of critter I felt for? This is why I threw away a perfectly good salad? A beast so vicious he would eat his brother’s heart?

I know all about the Donner Party. Time and time again, when faced with death, humans will choose to snack on each other. But I am pretty sure there were alternatives for the sick little cannibal fucker.

For one, there was a perfectly good salad in the trash can.