my bipedal lover

I have nothing due tomorrow, and I've been feeling very burnt out lately, so I didn't do homework today. Instead, I started reading The Origin of Humankind.

Yes, it's sort of a strange choice for pleasure reading, but my soc class this year has gotten me very interested in early people. I mean early, early people. People who'd just barely got out of the trees, and sat around and ate and shat and shagged. And walked.

Walking was the distinctive feature of the first humans, and even though the hunting and gathering and increase in brain size and invention of tools all came later, Mr. Richard Leakey has chosen the act of walking as the major distinctive milestone capable of earning our ancestors the (coveted) title "human". It was just that crazy, requiring drastic anatomical changes--of an unmitigated variety. But these apey people were still very apey. For a long, long time.

Anyway, not that this information is particularly revolutionary. My interest is more engulfed in the people that stopped being so apey and started being more human. Making crap, setting things on fire. I'd like to go back and see an early, Mesopotamian sort of society. Not to see what they're doing, but to watch them interact. I want to watch early interacting people. I want to see people start becoming confused about love, without generations of previous love stories to tell them what's happening. I want to watch them begin to develop poetry... when instinct and society began to give way to intense emotional terrain.

I sometimes have daydreams, as all people must, about interacting with ancient people. My most frequent scenario involves taking an ancient person, or maybe an ancestor from a time not so far back, like Roman times, and playing music. Beautiful music. Strange music. Modern music.

Of course, my intended outcome would surely not happen.. rather than this person's eyes widening in awe, and proclamations of love spilling forth, I think it is more likely that their eyebrows would furrow, and this person would ask what all the noise is about. Modern music is a bit more complex, and noisy. It might sound more like a chaotic scene in the market than a beautiful arrangement of instrumentation.

Not that I'm killing off that daydream. I find it far too pleasant. Sort of like the one where I take my great-great-great-grandfather, William Henry Wheeler, the civil war soldier who died in battle five days before the war ended, somewhere in Virginia...and drive him around in a car, much to his terror.