🕑 Added 2018-08-28 13:07:23 +0000 UTC
I am an evolutionary throwback.
It's not easy for me to admit this to myself; I'm proud of my mind, as it is the tool that best serves me and will stay sharp the longest as I age. But there is no permanence, and all tools dull, chip, and break in the fullness of time. And my mind is the result of billions of years, untold millions of generations of living things that have survived long enough to reproduce.
I call myself a throwback because after more than four decades of life in coming to realize that I'm ill sorted to modernity. I think in terms of physicality, the notion of money saddens, disturbs, or disgusts me depending on mood and stimulus, and I harbor a fondness for well trained and executed savagery. I can comprehend the necessity and even the rough ins and outs of manipulating numbers to decipher the world around us. But I'm poorly adapted to school, and I'm fascinated by the rough and ready ingenuity of primitive humans turning mud and rock to tools.
The world in which that human was developed, shaped, and adapted to is dying. Now is not an era of success for those with a passing ability for numbers, a survivor's appreciation for the visual difference between soy and Moreton Bay Chestnut nor the talent for shaping a clay pot without tools. All the things that appeal to me most are those skills for which the modern world has little use beyond bemused distraction. What use, then, for the Medicine Man whose herbalism is overshadowed by science, whose stone tools are supplanted by a trip to the hardware store? I peer into my soul to see the tribe's tale spinner, the last refugee of the tribal man, in a world where success and failure are determined by networking, money management, and the Hunter's instinct for commerce.
The Hunter still has a role, now. But I would gladly have been the tool maker, the bowyer, the tanner, the potter. The maker of small but necessary things. Now there is no respect for such men, and little living to be made either save by the generosity of others. Once we were respected, we were valuable! Once we were needed! Now, we are overlooked, scoffed at, or scorned. After all, we are another pair of hands for a dollar fifty an hour. Is it that makers became too successful, and we saturated the market?
A throwback. Something that is no longer useful in the current climate. Something old that has long since been superceded by something better.
The last refuge I have is to write. For a while, yet, we will still need stories. We will still need cautionary tales and fables and distractions. The last bastion of the throwback makers. Our last stop before being completely obsolete.
