Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   like the noises in Harrison Bergeron
Sunday, November 25 2007

setting: Silver Spring, Montgomery County, Maryland

Gretchen's friend Gilley came over this morning and we had a lunch of leftovers. We were interacting in an adultlike way until children were in the room, at which point things switched back to primary-colored Romper Room mode.
The problem with reproduction is that it seems to create a cap on any individual human's progress. Between one's own childhood and the birth of a child, a person grows and matures and takes on knowledge, becoming increasingly wise and nuanced. But then when that person produces a child, the child is a deep and hungry well of ignorance who most be carefully filled with wisdom. This is a time-consuming process, and in the meantime the adultness of all who happen within the child's gravitational pull stagnates. I suppose I knew all of this in the abstract, but seeing it play out in reality has been an unexpectedly depressing experience. Children are supposed to represent (if not embody) the future, and yet they demand so much from the present that they effectively truncate the future for the people they depend on and anyone else who happens by. You see, it's not just their parents who are affected. The shrieks and demands of little children interrupt the complicated machinery of thought for everyone within hearing distance, similar to the loud intelligence-handicapping mechanized noise in the tale of Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut. And yet, we as a society have come to accept this as a reasonable price for having a populated future.
Meanwhile we're permitted to be much less tolerant of the animal companions of our friends and families; for example, Gretchen and I have been told we cannot bring our dogs when we visit her brother because her sister-in-law "doesn't like dogs." But even though we "don't like babies and bratty children," we have to pretend like we do. More people should pretend they have allergies to disposable diapers as a way to maintain their adulthoods uninterrupted, in much the same way that people who dislike cats pretend they are allergic to them.
After lunch, Gilley, Gretchen and I walking in Sligo Creek Park and we discussed some of these things at length. Gilley, it's important to understand, was completely understanding. It was easy talking directly about such things when the audience included no one with an interest in the future of their particular set of genes. Why, I asked, do we pretend motherhood is so heroic when it's a transparently selfish act to perpetuate the information contained in nucleotide sequences?

At around 1:00pm, Gretchen and I started our drive back to Hurley. We retraced the route we'd taken down and experienced little trouble with gridlock except for an accident just west of the Route 100 exit on I-95 and just before the Delaware Turnpike toll booths. We stopped once for gas at the east end of I-95 in Maryland, and I briefly considered buying a bag of chips until Gretchen pointed out that they cost nearly $4. As gasoline's wholesale price continues to push skyward, gas stations have had to jack the profits they reap from their impulse-buy food in order to rely less on the very marginal profits that can be marketably added to the price of gas.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?071125

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