THE CUNNING FENNEC FOX: The Origin of Emotion and the Cunning Fennec Fox

27 May 2014

0815 hrs

Good Morning Patient Reader.

I sincerely hope you enjoyed (?) the Heidi Story that I have been posting over the last few days. I’ll try not to repeat my blogs too often, but I have been sort of in a funk this past while and I find the subjects that haunt me rise to the surface more at times like these.

They say that we are not supposed to live with regrets, but I don’t see how that is possible. My life is full of Should Haves and Should Have Nots. Aren’t yours? At least one or two?

So I think of these events and I wonder how I could have altered my behavior. I don’t live in the past, it’s just that some nights, as I lie in the dark wishing for sleep, I find my brain rolling the times around my skull’s interior like Queeg rolling the steel balls in his hand.

So these (women, mostly) people appear abruptly from the Before and I confront, and am confronted by, their vengeful ghosts. The Samaras of my past.

sarah through the looking glass

If you recall, I haven’t always been this awesome cat whose words caress your primary visual cortices; I used to be quite the asshole. Some may argue that I still am, and I will be the first to agree with that. Most of the time.

My friend Shmicole just told me that I was the guy who did not believe in any emotion other than tolerance. She was making a joke, of course, but there is always a little truth in jest, is there not? And I agreed, for the most part, but explained to her that it was much more complex than that.

Though I believe that love, like hate and fear and joy and sorrow, is merely a flood, or more accurately a cascade, of neurotransmitters. This does not mean that it is any less . . . important, however. In fact, because these biological events are so deeply rooted in our evolution, I find it more poignant that it is natural biomechanics than I would if it were endowed upon us by some old man in the sky that grants (sometimes) wishes.

We all can surely see the necessity of emotions when we consider what would have happened to our species had we not evolved the need to become a social animal.

Without claws or fangs, without empathy, we would have never survived the lions hunting.

So we “love” (or shoe or giraffe, etc) because it perpetuates the species. What can be more important than that? Yet we refuse to use this fundamental feature of our biology in ways that can benefit man. The few who actually make a find or invent a technology that would further the evolution of the species will be the first to tell you that these technologies are usually adopted first by the military. We killed with rockets long before we put Man into space with them, e.g.

There are exceptions every once in a while. Though the simplistic moral interpretation is up for debate, Jonas Salk refused to patent his polio vaccine stating, “Would you patent the sun?”

Republicans would try, and the greedy bastards would all say it was in the name of capitalism.

Ah, but once again, Patient Reader, I digress. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: I believe in the potential of humanity, not in humanity itself.