I hope that you will accept my apologies for the little artistic licence in the last post. I wasn't trying to imply I was a drunk, nor that I shop at Sainbury's (a bit far to go, England). Merely that I'm a genius! Hopefully you all got that anyway!
Talking about Beethoven got me thinking. Now we don't drink alcohol. Why would we? I do remember once taking a very small sip of some wine (Nuits St Georges, I think) after they'd had some binge of a 'leaving do' in the station one year. It was nice, but I wouldn't go out of my way to spend £30 ($60) to repeat the experience but you lot......All you ever think about is getting 'off your face'!
Now I can understand the Beethoven argument. I can understand that you might seek solace in alcohol if, say, your long term partner's left you, your mother's died, you're really stressed out at work etc. Drink to forget. Drink to sleep. But you only put off dealing with it. The pain, anguish, stress doesn't disappear. At some point, you have to come out of it and deal with it. Perhaps you just need some breathing space. OK, that I can handle.
But humans as a species have this insatiable desire to 'get off their face', 'out of their heads', 'bombed'. Every culture has got its drug of choice. They say either beer or bread came first when you first settled and started cultivating wild grasses, wheat, barley, corn, hops(?) 12,000 years ago. It was probably beer! You have found (and not in the last fifty years either) just about every psychotropic drug there is! Why?
Is this the price you pay for your consciousness? Now I know of course that lots of humans don't spend their time away on planet Pluto every two minutes but I think that has a lot to do with (a) fear and (b) social upbringing. There is a conscious choice not to engage on the part of that individual. But it doesn't explain why there appears to have been this driving force in humans to 'experiment' with just about everything on the planet in order to give you the opportunity to get wazzed whenever you feel like it!
Now, from a penguin's point of view, your behaviour all seems a little counter-productive but, more importantly, evoloutionary suicide. Can you imagine how long we'd last, here or in the sea, if we were snorting coke every half an hour? Dropping acid, boozing it up? The seals would think Christmas had come early! So it must have something to do with a lack of natural predators but also I think, this concept you have of 'somewhere else'. Somewhere you can go that's not here. Heaven? Nirvana? Dreamtime? The kind of place you sort of remember from your dreams when you wake up but that's then accessible through 'drugs' even when you're awake. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, what you lot need is a couple of predators on your tail. You'd find getting off your head a lot less attractive if it meant you got your bum bitten off when you did.
Talking of bum biting don't you just love it when 'cutesy' goes just a little awry? Cute little (well big, actually) dog below, ay? Pyrenean Mountain Dog, quite popular pets among westerners who can afford them, I understand.
Well, French shepherds are using them to guard their flocks from wolves which have recently re-entered France. Trouble is the dogs are attacking tourists!
Talking about Beethoven got me thinking. Now we don't drink alcohol. Why would we? I do remember once taking a very small sip of some wine (Nuits St Georges, I think) after they'd had some binge of a 'leaving do' in the station one year. It was nice, but I wouldn't go out of my way to spend £30 ($60) to repeat the experience but you lot......All you ever think about is getting 'off your face'!
Now I can understand the Beethoven argument. I can understand that you might seek solace in alcohol if, say, your long term partner's left you, your mother's died, you're really stressed out at work etc. Drink to forget. Drink to sleep. But you only put off dealing with it. The pain, anguish, stress doesn't disappear. At some point, you have to come out of it and deal with it. Perhaps you just need some breathing space. OK, that I can handle.
But humans as a species have this insatiable desire to 'get off their face', 'out of their heads', 'bombed'. Every culture has got its drug of choice. They say either beer or bread came first when you first settled and started cultivating wild grasses, wheat, barley, corn, hops(?) 12,000 years ago. It was probably beer! You have found (and not in the last fifty years either) just about every psychotropic drug there is! Why?
Is this the price you pay for your consciousness? Now I know of course that lots of humans don't spend their time away on planet Pluto every two minutes but I think that has a lot to do with (a) fear and (b) social upbringing. There is a conscious choice not to engage on the part of that individual. But it doesn't explain why there appears to have been this driving force in humans to 'experiment' with just about everything on the planet in order to give you the opportunity to get wazzed whenever you feel like it!
Now, from a penguin's point of view, your behaviour all seems a little counter-productive but, more importantly, evoloutionary suicide. Can you imagine how long we'd last, here or in the sea, if we were snorting coke every half an hour? Dropping acid, boozing it up? The seals would think Christmas had come early! So it must have something to do with a lack of natural predators but also I think, this concept you have of 'somewhere else'. Somewhere you can go that's not here. Heaven? Nirvana? Dreamtime? The kind of place you sort of remember from your dreams when you wake up but that's then accessible through 'drugs' even when you're awake. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, what you lot need is a couple of predators on your tail. You'd find getting off your head a lot less attractive if it meant you got your bum bitten off when you did.
Talking of bum biting don't you just love it when 'cutesy' goes just a little awry? Cute little (well big, actually) dog below, ay? Pyrenean Mountain Dog, quite popular pets among westerners who can afford them, I understand.
Well, French shepherds are using them to guard their flocks from wolves which have recently re-entered France. Trouble is the dogs are attacking tourists!
Now I suppose I shouldn't find that funny, but I do, enormously! Some poor hapless tourist decides to go stroke the big, cuddly fur ball and gets his bum bitten off! Absolutely priceless!
Had a long chat with Havelock yesterday and he agrees with me. It definitely isn't taking as long to get back to the sea this year.
You must forgive me for abandoning you to your brilliance. What moral decay on my part.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately my attention span is yea wide, which means I've already moved from Beethoven to Tan Dun. I have no idea of his choices of self-medication- nor his genius. Unless it has something to do with my Artist-God. I most seriously doubt a penguin could understand that last statement, but I may be entirely wrong.
I've lately wondered whether penguins occasionally take physics classes and if they are, by chance, qualified to educate the less than physically minded dingbats among us on a primar level. For those of us who are interested in the topic, but haven't a clue; those of us who find isotope decay fascinating, but have since decided to dig even deeper.
I completely understand if penguins are too busy migrating. I've been there myself.
PS- are there any penguins that can stand heat at all?
It's difficult for penguins to 'take classes'. Who would teach us? You lot? Besides, we'd never understand the lectures. No, we do the best we can by pulling down Penrose or Feynman and reading it until it finally sinks in. We don't have much else to do. Conversation gets a little boring after a couple of days. "What did you do yesterday?" "Sat on my egg and dreamt of fish." "Today?" "Sat on my egg and dreamt of fish."
ReplyDeleteBe a while yet before little Fricka is ready to go off on her own so if the questions are not too hard, who knows? The maths I can have trouble with but then when you can only count to three that's hardly surprising, is it?
As for Tan Dun. Well everyone thinks he's a genius but I just think he's stark raving mad! But then I think that of most of the avant-garde!
Oh forgot, I think I understand the Artist-God but that requires a full entry not a comment :-)
ReplyDeleteWell, thank you. I will google the two proper nouns you dropped. In the mean time, I think Beethoven was stark, raving mad. So, it's a wash, I guess.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like male penguins have quite a bit in common with pregnant female humans.
We don't have anything in common with pregant human females. From what I hear it's female humans, once a month, for 35 years or more! What's the T-shirt? "Go on punk, make my day"
ReplyDelete