I love Facebook. It is the new Christmas card. That’s the way I perceive Facebook these days. Whatever else it may be to me on a daily basis, I consider it at the very least to be the way I will stay in touch with people whom I don’t connect with very often. Instead of some ratty old scribbled-on, perpetually-incorrect and out-of-date address book like the one my mother has been dragging around for decades, Facebook lets me know where old neighbors, distant relatives, former colleagues, and middle-school girlfriends can be found if I need them, and often tells me what they are up to these days. Facebook gives me all of this without any effort at all. That’s why Facebook is cool.
But Facebook also gives me so much more. I can waste time during the day socializing with more current and geographically present friends, including those I do actually spend time with in person, when we are otherwise supposed to be working at our respective and supposed jobs. It reminds me of all the specials and events happening at my favorite local pubs. It updates my address book automatically with new profile photos of my friends, even the funny ones, so I see them on my phone when they call me. The other day I thought Duran Duran was trying to call me from the 80s, but it turns out my little sister just likes Duran Duran. Even if it means I sometimes have to be aware of how awesome Joe is at playing Mafia Wars, and how many barns Karen has on her virtual farm, it is totally worth it.
I once thought that having an Excel file with all my friends’ names, phone numbers, and email addresses in it was a big improvement over my mother’s address book, because I didn’t have to erase or scribble anything out to update it. I don’t have to update Facebook at all.
And even though this all happens more or less automatically, I still have options. I can choose whether to participate, and to what degree. I can post status updates, or just be nosey and read everyone else’s updates, commenting only when I have something mean to say. I can post pictures of my kids and/or my ridiculous drunken escapades while the kids are away with their mother, or not. I can post current photos of myself if I feel like it, or only old and awesome ones. I can look at photos of other people’s kids, and pretend I care by commenting about how cute they are, or I can make fun of them from a safe distance without hurting anyone’s feelings. I can keep separate lists of people with whom I have different kinds of relationships, and control what each of those groups of people sees. I can make sure that no one from work sees photos of my kids or is ever otherwise aware that I sometimes participate in wholesome family activities. I can make sure that my family members never see anything that might even slightly resemble professional activity. I can make sure that everyone sees the photos from outside the strip club. I have a very poor reputation to maintain, and Facebook helps me reach my goals.
I have some friends, henceforth referred to as “individuals formerly known as friends” because everyone knows that use of the term “friend” only applies to Facebook, who swear they will never use Facebook because of some deep-held philosophical, moral, or ethical convictions. I think that is a lot of bullshit. And I don’t say this only because I have no philosophy, morals, or ethics of my own. I also really mean it.
Some of these individuals formerly known as friends tell me that their disinterest in Facebook is a result of their preference to communicate “face-to-face” because it provides a richer and more meaningful interpersonal experience.
Bullshit.
If I avoided communicating with my friends and family except when there were time and opportunity to participate in a rich and meaningful interpersonal experience I wouldn’t have any friends or family at all. I spend time with people “face-to-face” when I can, but that time has never, to my knowledge, been described as a rich and meaningful interpersonal experience. Nor should time spent with me ever be considered such a thing. I am not that kind of guy.
Also, at least once, this concept of objection was explained to me via text message.
Still other individuals formerly known as friends tell me they are unwilling to make information about themselves available “out there on the internet” because they are afraid that something terrible might happen if a hundred old friends know what their new puppy looks like. Right-on. They just shouldn’t expect to hear from me very often. I am usually too busy removing tags from photos of myself to participate in any voice-based communicative exchanges.
But of all the new and unexpected social devices adopted by our culture as a result of our nearly universal embrace of social networking, my favorite is unfriending.
The Urban Dictionary defines “unfriend” as the act of removing a friend from your Facebook account.
I know there are a variety of different reasons for unfriending. I am not too concerned with the unfriendings that occur because you didn’t really want to share your life with an old acquaintance but you were too pussy to deny their initial friend request. I have done that, and sadly, have had it done to me. Likewise I get that you might want to unfriend people with whom you have had no actual contact for quite some time. I think this is especially popular with the kids these days who may have thousands of friends because they routinely add everyone with whom they ever come in contact. I can also appreciate more blanket unfriendings that sometimes occur as a reaction to a personal need for more privacy, perhaps in reaction to a stalker scare, or maybe because you want to share more information with fewer people. That is all good. I don’t have to stalk anyone. It is just a hobby.
The kind of unfriending that amuses me the most, is the angry unfriend. That one is going to be a classic.
The angry unfriend occurs when one person is mad at another person, and instead of, or perhaps in addition to an actual discussion about said disagreement, offense, or annoyance, one person removes the other from their list of friends on Facebook. That shit is hilarious. It is meant to be a punishment of some kind, and to send some sort of message. But it is the dumbest punishment ever, and typically sends no message at all. Still, it happens all the time.
It happened to me at least once that I know about. I pissed off my sister, and she unfriended me.
In my case the only reason I noticed at all is because my sister is one of those people who posts a lot of stupid shit on her Facebook wall all the time. Once upon a time I had to scroll past all her crap to get to any interesting updates from drinking buddies or good-looking women. One day I didn’t have to scroll at all. I knew immediately what had happened. And even though I don’t like my sister, and I was tired of seeing her horoscope or whatever crap she always posted, it still hurt my feelings a little. For passive-aggressive types, and you know who they are, unfriending might be the most powerful tool available.
But the thing is, it hurt my feelings in the dumbest way possible. I wasn’t actually hurt because she unfriended me, I expected that. We did have an argument in the real world. I was hurt because she didn’t even make the effort to actually tell me to fuck off. She could even have simply ignored me completely for a few years, and I might still have respected that. But unfriending me was just pussy.
The truth is that unfriending just doesn’t matter. It is pointless. When you unfriend someone they are not notified in any way. The person you unfriend would have to notice that you unfriended them. Typically I suppose this would happen if for some reason they tried to visit your page and were unable to access the information they wanted. But how often does that happen? For most of us, when you unfriend us, it just means you disappear from our newsfeed. Aside from the example above, I am not sure I would notice if someone disappeared from my newsfeed. People come and go all the time. I don’t regularly visit people’s Facebook pages except to get more information about something I saw posted on my newsfeed. I suspect most of us are like that. That is why we like Facebook. It is low-maintenance. It brings information to us so we don’t need to spend our time going out to gather it.
So what kind of ego is involved in unfriending out of anger? I think it assumes a level of interest in your own shit that may not actually exist. To even make the effort to find someone in your friends list and unfriend them you must assume that the former friend will notice the unfriending and therefore get the message with the intended impact. Why would you even bother otherwise? I don’t think I could assume that anyone would notice if I unfriended them. I imagine maybe I have been unfriended by more people than I realize. I don’t know. But I guess they showed me.
I try to imagine my mother, in years before the internet, being offended by a neighbor, or someone at church, and racing furiously to scribble their name, address, and phone number out of her address book.
Now that just seems silly.
Thursday
Friday
Petroglyphs, Pornography and the Misconceptions of Human Nature
When I go to the bookstore, I am constantly barraged with reminders that I need to be writing rather than reading.
My favorite section in any bookstore these days is reference. This is where everything happens. It is always tucked away in a corner, because no one actually buys encyclopedias anymore (bookstores don't even stock them), and because people think it is filled with nothing but lexicons of all size and color. Perhaps, but, the reference section is the place to find the books I like to read these days.
Don't get me wrong, I do have lexiconological opinions. And, yes, that is a made-up word. I think the American Heritage Dictionary is the greatest dictionary ever created by man, and for seventy-five dollars it ought to be. I know what you "scholars" are thinking, but the people at Oxford English can suck my cock. Etymology is interesting, though highly subjective, and is good stuff at parties. But I don't really need it in my fucking dictionary. I need what American Heritage has. Also, it says "American," and I am biased. Oxford is for pussies.
However, in the reference section at most of the larger, highly-commercial bookstores we have all come to love, you will find all sorts of other interesting books of facts, lists, "forbidden knowledge," and what-not. Those books are my favorite. I pick up and spout off more useless knowledge than Cliff Claven. Some of my kids have even picked up this trait, and throw it back in my face when I talk to them on the phone each night. I have one kid who watches the Discovery channel, the Science Channel, Animal Planet, PBS, and the National Geographic channel all day long, remembers everything, and tells me every night everything he has learned, in great detail. I now know what it is like to be on the giving and receiving end of useless knowledge. And let me tell you, I am surprised I have any friends at all.
The thing about less-traditional reference books is that they make me think about other things. In my quest for ridiculously impractical knowledge, I find connections I might not otherwise have found. And as I sit and think through these things, usually in a pub somewhere, around noon, I am struck over and over again by how much we don't know.
Don't get me wrong, as a people, we have accumulated massive amounts of knowledge. We are smarter, more highly educated, and more articulate than any group of human beings has ever been – as far as we know, but it is probably true. But it seems odd to me how much faith we put in some of our theories and "traditions" that are so new themselves. Don't get me wrong, I am a man of science. I am a Darwinist, a Behavioralist, and consequently and Atheist. I believe in the out-of-Africa theory. I know in my soul that deep down inside we are all black Africans (Did you know, for example, that it probably only takes 20,000 years of living in Northern Europe to turn a people's skin from black to white?). But I do realize that they are just theories, and I am willing to believe anything new with better evidence. The point here is, we just don't know. And I for one am perfectly happy not knowing. I find great comfort in it. But I think that as a people, we have a quest to want to know, and be sure of everything, so even when we clearly don't know something, we make up a story, call it fact, and profess our faith in the theory, with little or no evidence.
We just want to be sure of something.
Since I was a child, I have often thought about the possibility that all this, our society, our cities, our technology, our way of life, might have existed before, right in the places where we live, and we would never know. I still wonder about this. I studied just enough geology and physical science to understand how extremely dynamic the surface of our planet is. And I fully believe, that all of this, or something very similar, might have all happened before, 20, 000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, and there may well be no evidence of it left whatsoever. And it could all happen again, and there would be no evidence of us whatsoever.
The point here is that everything we know about our own history we know by accident. We just happened to find a few things. But the facts don't match up. I don't think the logic is fully there. We have not connected the right people to the right information to come up with the right theories. Let me explain a little about what I mean.
We know that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) have walked the earth for at least several hundred thousand years. We know that we once shared space with other species of humans, most recently Neanderthals. We don't know whether we competed for resources with European Neanderthals, and killed them all off, or whether we just inter-bred with them, and they are still among us, so to speak. We also know that upright, bipedal, hominids (apes that stand up and walk on two legs, like us) have been around for at least four million years, though some bastards in Chad a few years ago discovered some remains that might make us as old as eight million years. And we know, that in all that time, many species of hominid, and perhaps other species of hominids that we might, having come face to face with them, described as "human," have existed, and perished on this here planet. And we know all that by fucking accident!
Imagine how much we don't know about our own story.
And today, we believe that only one species of human, and hominid, exists on the planet. And we think we own the fucking place. I don't know about you kids, but when I consider that a group of animals that was once as diverse as us finds itself occupying an entire planet with a single species, it isn't time to celebrate our accomplishments. It is time to put ourselves on the endangered species list.
But I digress. In contrast to our very long and extremely varied history (that we know of), we take great pride, and go to great lengths to protect many objects, traditions, values, and mores, to borrow a term from the sixties, that really aren't that old.
Did you know the piano was invented in 1700? Yeah that surprised me also. Doesn't it seem like something we consider to be so "classical," which we make a part of so many of our religious, cultural, and personal family celebrations should be older than that? The piano in my house growing up was almost sacred. It was as important a part of our spiritual and cultural life as clothes were to our physical life. But it has only been around for a few hundred years, so how important could it really be? How many generations of my family tree passed their lives as good people with no piano, or songs, or music at all for that matter? Music itself, at least the way we know it today, is a fairly recent invention. Yet music is so important to so many of us. It is such a major part of our identities it is ridiculous.
I think the point I am trying to make is that all of our current "rituals," whether they be practical, religious, political, or otherwise, the things we tend to take so seriously in our lives, are all relatively "modern" inventions, given the sheer scope of humanity's existence on this planet.
And this leads me to my next point. I think our modern scientists get a lot of theories wrong. I think Archeologists in particular, base a lot of their conclusions on the rituals and behaviors of modern man, rather than our instincts and emotions, which in my mind, are much more likely to transcend the generations of humanity.
I read the new every day. I have time for that. Every time I read about some new archeological discovery, whether it be a specific artifact, the foundation of some long-forgotten city, or a cave-painting, the explanation for the existence of said discovery is almost always a spiritual or religious explanation of some sort. I mean, sometimes these guys understand that the room with the hole in the ground was where these people took a piss, they often get the practical. But it seems that whenever a purely practical explanation for the existence of some new discovery can't be found, they automatically attach some religious or spiritual significance to it.
This doesn't work for me, because, assuming that my ancestors were much like me in the way they felt and thought every day, on a chemical-emotional level, I have to think, that much like we do, they sometimes did things, or built things, or invented things, or used things, because they thought it was cool, and for no other reason. I can assure you that everything in my daily life, which might one day be discovered by some distant scientist, can not be dichotomized into practical or religious. How might they explain the KISS belt buckle for example, or the massive bong, or porn?
I can only imagine what science will say about us one day.
Let's take petroglyphs as an example. When I lived in Utah, I had the pleasure of seeing ancient petroglyphs painted here and there on rocks and canyon walls about the state. I had read about them for years, and they fascinated me. What might they mean? What might this long forgotten culture be trying to tell us now? I spent much time thinking about them.
And then I had the pleasure of becoming a father to a pile of kids. As my kids grew older, and learned to reach the pens, pencils, and crayons in the places I hid them without permission, I began to see something positively amazing happen around my home. I saw little petroglyphs pop up on walls, doors, windows, floorboards, molding, refrigerators, dishwashers, everything. The similarities were unmistakable. They had geometric designs. They were placed in seemingly random places. They depicted people and animals in all sorts of varying activities. They demonstrated a distinctly primitive level of artistic skill. They seemed to be created with whatever drawing material was most locally convenient. And they almost always included some kind of handprints, hand-outlines, or "signatures" as archeologists who study cave drawings call them.
I never looked at petroglyphs the same way again. I am not kidding you. Every time I ever read anything about petroglyphs, some kind of cultural or religious significance was attached to each design. I don't buy it. I am willing to believe that almost all of the ancient cave drawings, etchings, or other petroglyphs we find are just kids, or drunk guys, fucking around with red mud, because they could. Those unmistakably male and female characters were not "sacred symbols of fertility." They were one kid saying "ha ha there is you dad with a huge boner." And his friend replying "well there is your mom with huge tits."
And speaking of fertility, recently I read a little bit about the origin of sculpture as an art form. The oldest sculpture known to man is a little tiny depiction of a nude woman, about 25,000 years old, called the Venus of something (all ancient sculptures of nude women are apparently a Venus of something or other), and is largely considered to be a sacred symbol of fertility to some ancient and unknown people. The reason that scientists and historians believe it to be a symbol of fertility is that some parts of her body are grossly exaggerated and out of proportion with the rest of her. You guessed it. She has huge tits, and a huge ass.
It occurred to me, and maybe I am wrong, I often am, that this might not be a symbol of fertility at all. I thought, just for a moment, that this might just been the earliest masturbatory aid known to man.
Now I know what the do-gooders and intellectuals are thinking. Why do I have to assign such crass value to something that might otherwise be considered sacred and beautiful? Maybe we haven’t met. That’s what I do. I also have to because it is much more likely to be the fucking case in my mind. Remember, I think it is emotions and instincts that carry better across generations of humanity than rituals. I suspect that these 25,000 year old bastards maybe never even heard of a "symbol of fertility." But I do know that people like to masturbate. I have no reason to think that has ever changed. I know that guys like big tits and healthy asses on women. I understand that every culture defines its own version of what is attractive, but big tits and big asses actually feel better when it comes right down to it. I have no reason to think that has changed.
Let's consider some more modern examples. Remember VCRs? We all used to have them. Anyone remember when they were new, in the late seventies? Did you ever have one that was the size of a coffee table, where the tape popped out of the top, and if you were lucky it had a big long wire stretching across the room for a remote? Remember when they cost way more money than anyone could really afford? That was in 1978. But only ten years later, by 1988, literally everyone had one. Think about that for a minute. What other technology has ever caught on that quickly? Arguably more important than a VCR, it took almost a hundred years before everyone had their own telephone.
Even television took 50 years to really catch on and become universal. Cell phones? They have been popular more than 20 years and I still know people who don't have one. So why did everyone have a VCR after only ten years? Simple. Pornography.
Everyone loves porn. And with a VCR, you no longer had to go to a nasty old theater and watch Pee Wee jack-off to see porn. You could have it any time right in your own home! Porn in the privacy of your own home must have been revolutionary back then. I kid you not. Pornography made the VCR a household device in ten years. Why do you think mom and dad always had a VCR in their room? They never seemed to watch movies or record shows in there, but they had one. Hmmm.
What else? You already know, the internet of course, and the home computer. Home computers were around for many, many years, and only a few people ever cared about them. Then, in the late nineties, everyone, literally everyone, had to have a computer in their home. What changed? The internet became widely used and popular. And the internet promised porn. There was tons of porn. More porn than would wear out eighteen VCRs. And again, it was all in the privacy of your own home. Even now, 25% of all search engine requests are for pornography. And we should be desensitized already. But we aren't.
Pornography drove two of the largest cultural revolutions western civilization has ever seen. I have no reason to think that things were any different for our ancestors. I think every "symbol of fertility" was more likely some kind of pornography.
So as I read through more useless fact and unimportant trivia. I continue to make larger connections to the world. We have to constantly question everything we think we know. And we have to constantly consider the things we are sure we do not know. And until we can connect all of our sciences, and really think through the little bit of knowledge we do have, we must remain somewhat skeptical. The truth might be out there, but right now at least, we have no idea what it is. But it probably has something to do with porn.
My favorite section in any bookstore these days is reference. This is where everything happens. It is always tucked away in a corner, because no one actually buys encyclopedias anymore (bookstores don't even stock them), and because people think it is filled with nothing but lexicons of all size and color. Perhaps, but, the reference section is the place to find the books I like to read these days.
Don't get me wrong, I do have lexiconological opinions. And, yes, that is a made-up word. I think the American Heritage Dictionary is the greatest dictionary ever created by man, and for seventy-five dollars it ought to be. I know what you "scholars" are thinking, but the people at Oxford English can suck my cock. Etymology is interesting, though highly subjective, and is good stuff at parties. But I don't really need it in my fucking dictionary. I need what American Heritage has. Also, it says "American," and I am biased. Oxford is for pussies.
However, in the reference section at most of the larger, highly-commercial bookstores we have all come to love, you will find all sorts of other interesting books of facts, lists, "forbidden knowledge," and what-not. Those books are my favorite. I pick up and spout off more useless knowledge than Cliff Claven. Some of my kids have even picked up this trait, and throw it back in my face when I talk to them on the phone each night. I have one kid who watches the Discovery channel, the Science Channel, Animal Planet, PBS, and the National Geographic channel all day long, remembers everything, and tells me every night everything he has learned, in great detail. I now know what it is like to be on the giving and receiving end of useless knowledge. And let me tell you, I am surprised I have any friends at all.
The thing about less-traditional reference books is that they make me think about other things. In my quest for ridiculously impractical knowledge, I find connections I might not otherwise have found. And as I sit and think through these things, usually in a pub somewhere, around noon, I am struck over and over again by how much we don't know.
Don't get me wrong, as a people, we have accumulated massive amounts of knowledge. We are smarter, more highly educated, and more articulate than any group of human beings has ever been – as far as we know, but it is probably true. But it seems odd to me how much faith we put in some of our theories and "traditions" that are so new themselves. Don't get me wrong, I am a man of science. I am a Darwinist, a Behavioralist, and consequently and Atheist. I believe in the out-of-Africa theory. I know in my soul that deep down inside we are all black Africans (Did you know, for example, that it probably only takes 20,000 years of living in Northern Europe to turn a people's skin from black to white?). But I do realize that they are just theories, and I am willing to believe anything new with better evidence. The point here is, we just don't know. And I for one am perfectly happy not knowing. I find great comfort in it. But I think that as a people, we have a quest to want to know, and be sure of everything, so even when we clearly don't know something, we make up a story, call it fact, and profess our faith in the theory, with little or no evidence.
We just want to be sure of something.
Since I was a child, I have often thought about the possibility that all this, our society, our cities, our technology, our way of life, might have existed before, right in the places where we live, and we would never know. I still wonder about this. I studied just enough geology and physical science to understand how extremely dynamic the surface of our planet is. And I fully believe, that all of this, or something very similar, might have all happened before, 20, 000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, and there may well be no evidence of it left whatsoever. And it could all happen again, and there would be no evidence of us whatsoever.
The point here is that everything we know about our own history we know by accident. We just happened to find a few things. But the facts don't match up. I don't think the logic is fully there. We have not connected the right people to the right information to come up with the right theories. Let me explain a little about what I mean.
We know that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) have walked the earth for at least several hundred thousand years. We know that we once shared space with other species of humans, most recently Neanderthals. We don't know whether we competed for resources with European Neanderthals, and killed them all off, or whether we just inter-bred with them, and they are still among us, so to speak. We also know that upright, bipedal, hominids (apes that stand up and walk on two legs, like us) have been around for at least four million years, though some bastards in Chad a few years ago discovered some remains that might make us as old as eight million years. And we know, that in all that time, many species of hominid, and perhaps other species of hominids that we might, having come face to face with them, described as "human," have existed, and perished on this here planet. And we know all that by fucking accident!
Imagine how much we don't know about our own story.
And today, we believe that only one species of human, and hominid, exists on the planet. And we think we own the fucking place. I don't know about you kids, but when I consider that a group of animals that was once as diverse as us finds itself occupying an entire planet with a single species, it isn't time to celebrate our accomplishments. It is time to put ourselves on the endangered species list.
But I digress. In contrast to our very long and extremely varied history (that we know of), we take great pride, and go to great lengths to protect many objects, traditions, values, and mores, to borrow a term from the sixties, that really aren't that old.
Did you know the piano was invented in 1700? Yeah that surprised me also. Doesn't it seem like something we consider to be so "classical," which we make a part of so many of our religious, cultural, and personal family celebrations should be older than that? The piano in my house growing up was almost sacred. It was as important a part of our spiritual and cultural life as clothes were to our physical life. But it has only been around for a few hundred years, so how important could it really be? How many generations of my family tree passed their lives as good people with no piano, or songs, or music at all for that matter? Music itself, at least the way we know it today, is a fairly recent invention. Yet music is so important to so many of us. It is such a major part of our identities it is ridiculous.
I think the point I am trying to make is that all of our current "rituals," whether they be practical, religious, political, or otherwise, the things we tend to take so seriously in our lives, are all relatively "modern" inventions, given the sheer scope of humanity's existence on this planet.
And this leads me to my next point. I think our modern scientists get a lot of theories wrong. I think Archeologists in particular, base a lot of their conclusions on the rituals and behaviors of modern man, rather than our instincts and emotions, which in my mind, are much more likely to transcend the generations of humanity.
I read the new every day. I have time for that. Every time I read about some new archeological discovery, whether it be a specific artifact, the foundation of some long-forgotten city, or a cave-painting, the explanation for the existence of said discovery is almost always a spiritual or religious explanation of some sort. I mean, sometimes these guys understand that the room with the hole in the ground was where these people took a piss, they often get the practical. But it seems that whenever a purely practical explanation for the existence of some new discovery can't be found, they automatically attach some religious or spiritual significance to it.
This doesn't work for me, because, assuming that my ancestors were much like me in the way they felt and thought every day, on a chemical-emotional level, I have to think, that much like we do, they sometimes did things, or built things, or invented things, or used things, because they thought it was cool, and for no other reason. I can assure you that everything in my daily life, which might one day be discovered by some distant scientist, can not be dichotomized into practical or religious. How might they explain the KISS belt buckle for example, or the massive bong, or porn?
I can only imagine what science will say about us one day.
Let's take petroglyphs as an example. When I lived in Utah, I had the pleasure of seeing ancient petroglyphs painted here and there on rocks and canyon walls about the state. I had read about them for years, and they fascinated me. What might they mean? What might this long forgotten culture be trying to tell us now? I spent much time thinking about them.
And then I had the pleasure of becoming a father to a pile of kids. As my kids grew older, and learned to reach the pens, pencils, and crayons in the places I hid them without permission, I began to see something positively amazing happen around my home. I saw little petroglyphs pop up on walls, doors, windows, floorboards, molding, refrigerators, dishwashers, everything. The similarities were unmistakable. They had geometric designs. They were placed in seemingly random places. They depicted people and animals in all sorts of varying activities. They demonstrated a distinctly primitive level of artistic skill. They seemed to be created with whatever drawing material was most locally convenient. And they almost always included some kind of handprints, hand-outlines, or "signatures" as archeologists who study cave drawings call them.
I never looked at petroglyphs the same way again. I am not kidding you. Every time I ever read anything about petroglyphs, some kind of cultural or religious significance was attached to each design. I don't buy it. I am willing to believe that almost all of the ancient cave drawings, etchings, or other petroglyphs we find are just kids, or drunk guys, fucking around with red mud, because they could. Those unmistakably male and female characters were not "sacred symbols of fertility." They were one kid saying "ha ha there is you dad with a huge boner." And his friend replying "well there is your mom with huge tits."
And speaking of fertility, recently I read a little bit about the origin of sculpture as an art form. The oldest sculpture known to man is a little tiny depiction of a nude woman, about 25,000 years old, called the Venus of something (all ancient sculptures of nude women are apparently a Venus of something or other), and is largely considered to be a sacred symbol of fertility to some ancient and unknown people. The reason that scientists and historians believe it to be a symbol of fertility is that some parts of her body are grossly exaggerated and out of proportion with the rest of her. You guessed it. She has huge tits, and a huge ass.
It occurred to me, and maybe I am wrong, I often am, that this might not be a symbol of fertility at all. I thought, just for a moment, that this might just been the earliest masturbatory aid known to man.
Now I know what the do-gooders and intellectuals are thinking. Why do I have to assign such crass value to something that might otherwise be considered sacred and beautiful? Maybe we haven’t met. That’s what I do. I also have to because it is much more likely to be the fucking case in my mind. Remember, I think it is emotions and instincts that carry better across generations of humanity than rituals. I suspect that these 25,000 year old bastards maybe never even heard of a "symbol of fertility." But I do know that people like to masturbate. I have no reason to think that has ever changed. I know that guys like big tits and healthy asses on women. I understand that every culture defines its own version of what is attractive, but big tits and big asses actually feel better when it comes right down to it. I have no reason to think that has changed.
Let's consider some more modern examples. Remember VCRs? We all used to have them. Anyone remember when they were new, in the late seventies? Did you ever have one that was the size of a coffee table, where the tape popped out of the top, and if you were lucky it had a big long wire stretching across the room for a remote? Remember when they cost way more money than anyone could really afford? That was in 1978. But only ten years later, by 1988, literally everyone had one. Think about that for a minute. What other technology has ever caught on that quickly? Arguably more important than a VCR, it took almost a hundred years before everyone had their own telephone.
Even television took 50 years to really catch on and become universal. Cell phones? They have been popular more than 20 years and I still know people who don't have one. So why did everyone have a VCR after only ten years? Simple. Pornography.
Everyone loves porn. And with a VCR, you no longer had to go to a nasty old theater and watch Pee Wee jack-off to see porn. You could have it any time right in your own home! Porn in the privacy of your own home must have been revolutionary back then. I kid you not. Pornography made the VCR a household device in ten years. Why do you think mom and dad always had a VCR in their room? They never seemed to watch movies or record shows in there, but they had one. Hmmm.
What else? You already know, the internet of course, and the home computer. Home computers were around for many, many years, and only a few people ever cared about them. Then, in the late nineties, everyone, literally everyone, had to have a computer in their home. What changed? The internet became widely used and popular. And the internet promised porn. There was tons of porn. More porn than would wear out eighteen VCRs. And again, it was all in the privacy of your own home. Even now, 25% of all search engine requests are for pornography. And we should be desensitized already. But we aren't.
Pornography drove two of the largest cultural revolutions western civilization has ever seen. I have no reason to think that things were any different for our ancestors. I think every "symbol of fertility" was more likely some kind of pornography.
So as I read through more useless fact and unimportant trivia. I continue to make larger connections to the world. We have to constantly question everything we think we know. And we have to constantly consider the things we are sure we do not know. And until we can connect all of our sciences, and really think through the little bit of knowledge we do have, we must remain somewhat skeptical. The truth might be out there, but right now at least, we have no idea what it is. But it probably has something to do with porn.
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